THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 189 



titious point. He does not make the impression of 

 the scholar or artist or litterateur, but such as you 

 would imagine the antique heroes to make, — that of 

 a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic 

 man, with, further than that, a look about him that 

 is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical. 

 It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, 

 after an hour's interview, "that he suggested some- 

 thing a little more than human. " In fact, the main 

 clew to Walt Whitman's life and personality, and 

 the expression of them in his poems, is to be found 

 in about the largest emotional element that has ap- 

 peared anywhere. This, if not controlled by a po- 

 tent rational balance, would either have tossed him 

 helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as 

 ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin. These vol- 

 canic emotional fires appear everywhere in his books ; 

 and it is really these, aroused to intense activity 

 and unnatural strain during the four years of the 

 war, and persistent labors in the hospitals, that have 

 resulted in his illness and paralysis since. 



It has been impossible, I say, to resist these per- 

 sonal impressions and magnetisms, and impossible 

 with me not to follow them up in the poems, in 

 doing which I found that his "Leaves of Grass" 

 was really the drama of himself, played upon va- 

 rious and successive stages of nature, history, pas- 

 sion, experience, patriotism, etc., and that he had 

 not made, nor had he intended to make, mere excel- 

 lent "poems," tunes, statues, or statuettes, in the 

 ordinary sense. 



