8 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 



to contemporary authors than to the men of the 

 past. I have lived in the present time, in the pre- 

 sent hour, and have invested myself in the objects 

 nearest at hand. Besides the writers I have men- 

 tioned, I am conscious of owing a debt to Whitman, 

 Ruskin, Arnold, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Ten- 

 nyson. To Whitman I owe a certain liberalizing 

 influence, as well as a lesson in patriotism which 

 I could have got in the same measure from no 

 other source. Whitman opens the doors, and opens 

 them wide. He pours a flood of human sympathy 

 which sets the whole world afloat. He is a great 

 humanizing power. There is no other personality 

 in literature that gives me such a sense of breadth 

 and magnitude in the purely human and personal 

 qualities. His poems are dominated by a sense 

 of a living, breathing man as no other poems are. 

 This would not recommend them to some read- 

 ers, but it recommends them to such as I, who 

 value in books perennial human qualities above all 

 things. To put a great personality in poetry is to 

 establish a living fountain of power, where the jaded 

 and exhausted race can refresh and renew itself. 



To a man in many ways the opposite of Whit- 

 man, who stands for an entirely different, almost 

 antagonistic, order of ideas, — to wit, Matthew 

 Arnold, — I am indebted for a lesson in clear think- 

 ing and clean expression such as I have got from 

 no other. Arnold's style is probably the most lucid, 



