WOMAN AND FREEDOM IN WHITMAN 373 



her, which belongs of right to all the sex, and is, or ought to 

 be, the invariable atmosphere and common aureola of old as 

 well as young." 



Then there is the Peacemaker, "the resplendent person" 

 his dear mother once described to him, "the neighborly, sen- 

 sible, and discreet woman, an invariable and welcomed favor- 

 ite." Whitman admits that these three last portraits are " fright- 

 fully out of line" from the models, "the stock feminine char- 

 acters of the current novelist, or of the foreign court poems, 

 . . . which fill the envying dreams of so many poor girls and 

 are accepted by our men, too, as supreme ideals of feminine 

 excellence to be sought after." Whitman says of his ideals, 

 "But I present mine just for a change." 



But above all, Whitman lingers with most affectionate 

 touch at motherhood: "O the mother's joys! The watching, 

 the endurance, the precious love, the anguish, the patiently 

 yielded life," to him the womanly attribute, at once the 

 most potent and divine, to him the consummation of the early 

 promise in the eons of the past when the structures of organic 

 life, emerging from cosmic forces, bore characters of femi- 

 ninity. The sweet and joyous recollections of his own mother 

 tinged with a sacred flame all relationships of mother and 

 child, and in no other of her roles is woman more warmly 

 described by him than as mother. "O ripened joy of wo- 

 manhood! O happiness at last!" 



The mother stands as symbol and seal of immortality. 



In his glowing tribute to his mother's memory, Whitman 

 graves a monumental line: "To her, the ideal woman, prac- 

 tical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to (him) the best." 



A truly beautiful attribute is that of mother and child, to 

 Whitman, and when extended to broader horizons on the 

 planes beyond the bodily motherhood, the thought grows to 

 noble proportions. Woman considered as the mother of great 

 intellectual and spiritual progeny. The giver out of the fluid 

 of true life. A mother for humanity verily; in this sense the 

 human motherhood of Whitman is impressive, she exists for 

 the race at large, she is the impersonification of the demo- 

 cratic idea, a thought of fullest possibility. The human mother 



