THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 187 



It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt 

 Whitman printed (in 1855) his first thin beginning 

 volume of "Leaves of Grass;" and, holding him to 

 the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, 

 "that the proof of the poet shall be sternly deferred 

 till his country has absorb' d him as affectionately as 

 he has absorb' d it," he is yet on trial, yet makes 

 his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. 

 That his complete absorption, however, by his own 

 country and by the world, is ultimately to take 

 place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and 

 stronger within me as time passes, and I suppose it 

 is with a hope to help forward this absorption that 

 I write of him now. Only here and there has he 

 yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and 

 more virile minds. But considering the unparalleled 

 audacity of his undertaking, and the absence in most 

 critics and readers of anything like full-grown and 

 robust sesthetic perception, the wonder really is not 

 that he should have made such slow progress, but 

 that he should have gained any foothold at all. The 

 whole literary technique of the race for the last two 

 hundred years has been squarely against him, laying 

 as it does the emphasis upon form and scholarly 

 endowments instead of upon aboriginal power and 

 manhood. 



My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, 

 has doubtless been much facilitated by contact — 

 talks, meals, jaunts, etc. — with him, stretching 

 through a decade of years, and by seeing how every- 

 thing in his personnel was resumed and carried for- 



