THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 201 



One great service of Walt Whitman is that he 

 exerts a tremendous influence to bring the race up 

 qn this nether side, — to place the emotional, the as- 

 similative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous, intui- 

 tive man, the man of the fluids and of the affections, 

 flush with the intellectual man. That we moderns 

 have fallen behind here is unquestionable, and we 

 in this country more than the Old World peoples. 

 All the works of Whitman, prose and verse, are 

 embosomed in a sea of emotional humanity, and 

 they float deeper than they show; there is far more 

 in what they necessitate and imply than in what 

 they say. 



It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we 

 are in danger in America, but of calcareous. The 

 fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating; surfaces 

 are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in 

 the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp 

 and hard, nothing is held in solution, all is precipi- 

 tated in well-defined ideas and opinions. 



But when I think of the type of character planted 

 and developed by my poet, I think of a man or wo- 

 man rich above all things in the genial human 

 attributes, one "nine times folded" in an atmos- 

 phere of tenderest, most considerate humanity, — an 

 atmosphere warm with the breath of a tropic heart, 

 that makes your buds of affection and of genius start 

 and unfold like a south wind in May. Your inter- 

 course with such a character is not merely intellec- 

 tual; it is deeper and better than that. Walter 

 Scott carried such a fund of sympathy and good- will 



