FIELD AND STUDY 



and Emerson, we get the thrill of the idyllic, or the 

 charm of the pastoral. In Whitman we get the lift 

 and sweep of the epic, and, at times, the stir of the 

 dramatic. We may not like him, — not everybody 

 can endure a plunge in the surf, — but we should 

 recognize his power, and the genuineness of his in- 

 spiration, and that our dislike of him comes more 

 from our indoor and bookish habits, our over- 

 refinements, our artificial standards, our anaemic 

 blood, than from any want of the truly poetic in his 

 "Leaves." 



His attitude toward his subject-matter is always 

 that of the creative artist, never, that of the prose- 

 writer, or the preacher, or the speculative philoso- 

 pher. He gives nothing as duties, as he himself says, 

 but as living impulses; he gives nothing as finished 

 poetry, but as the soul and suggestion of poetry. 

 His book is not a temple of art, builded as the great 

 architects of verse, from Virgil to Tennyson, built 

 it, but is the work of the creative and assimilative 

 artistic spirit where life is unloosed and we breathe 

 the air of primal and universal nature. To describe 

 him as merely rude and hirsute and untaught is to 

 miss the mark entirely; he is elemental and prim- 

 itive, but he is orbic and inclusive. Neither do the 

 epithets "robust," " athletic," "masculine," and 

 the like fitly describe him. He is more and better 

 than these; he is tender, yearning, motherly. 



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