222 BIRDS AND POETS 



" Move eastward, happy earth, and leave 



Yon orange sunset waning slow ; 

 From fringes of the faded eve, 



O happy planet, eastward go ; 



Till over thy dark shoulder glow 

 Thy silver sister-world, and rise 

 To glass herself in dewy eyes 



That watch me from the glen below." 



A recognition of the planetary system, and of the 

 great fact that the earth moves eastward through the 

 heavens, in a soft and tender love-song ! 



But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the fuU, 

 practical absorption and re-departure therefrom, of 

 the astounding idea that the earth is a star in the 

 heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown 

 and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the 

 flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent 

 unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is 

 no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved 

 in the fervent heat of the poet's heart, and charged 

 with emotion. "The words of true poems," he 

 says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." 

 Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doc- 

 trine of evolution : — 



" I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over, 

 And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons. 

 And call anything close again when I desire it. 



" In vain the speeding and shyness ; 



In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my ap- 

 proach; 



In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones; 



In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes ; 



In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters 

 lying low." 



