THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 205 



stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but 

 nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its 

 place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be 

 pampered and cosseted. Among educated people 

 here there is a mania for the bleached, the double- 

 refined, — white houses, white chiua, white marble, 

 and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out 

 of the flour in order to have white bread, and are 

 bolting our literature as fast as possible. 



It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt 

 Whitman is more read abroad than in his own coun- 

 try. It is on the rank, human, and emotional side 

 — sex, magnetism, health, physique, etc. — that he 

 is so full. Then his receptivity and assimilative 

 powers are enormous, and he demands these in his 

 reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as much 

 as they are intellectual. They radiate from his en- 

 tire being, and are charged to repletion with that 

 blended quality of mind and body — psychic and 

 physiologic — which the living form and presence 

 send forth. Never before in poetry has the body 

 received such ennoblement. The great theme is 

 Identity, and identity comes through the body; 

 and aU that pertains to the body, the poet teaches, 

 is entailed upon the spirit. In ■ his rapt gaze, the 

 body and the soul are one, and what debases the 

 one debases the other. Hence he glorifies the body. 

 Not more ardently and purely did the great sculp- 

 tors of antiquity carve it in the enduring marble 

 than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and 

 flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direc- 



