THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 233 



as you, and the whole spirit of our current times, 

 have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature 

 or Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but 

 pictures, books, art, and the selected and refined, — 

 just so these poems will doubtless first shock and 

 disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful 

 is never the feeling directly and chiefly addressed in 

 them, but your love for the breathing flesh, the con- 

 crete reality, the moving forms and shows of the 

 imiverse. A man reaches and moves you, not an 

 artist. Doubtless, too, a certain withholding and 

 repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous to a 

 cold sea plunge ; and it is not till you experience the 

 reaction, the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge 

 of the strong waves, that you know what Walt 

 Whitman's pages really are. They don't give them- 

 selves at first, — like the real landscape and the sea, 

 they are all indirections. You may have to try 

 them many times; there is something of Nature's 

 rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, 

 but probably always. But after you have mastered 

 them by resigning yourself to them, there is nothing 

 like them anywhere in literature for vital help and 

 meaning. The poet says : — 



" The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, 

 That scorn the best I can do to relate them." 



And the press of your mind to these pages wiU 

 certainly start new and countless problems that po- 

 etry and art have never before touched, and that 

 afford a perpetual stimulus and delight. 



It has been said that the object of poetry and the 



