378 LITERARY PAPERS 
him. Immortality is the flux which resolves all inequalities 
into equalities. 
“Why, what have you thought of yourself? 
Is it you, then, that thought yourself less ? 
Is it you that thought the President greater than you? 
Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you? 
Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk, or a thief, 
Or that you are diseas’d, or rheumatic, or a prostitute, 
Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar and never saw 
your name in print, 
Do you give in that you are any less immortal?” 
This unity with that undying principle unites us all in 
this life and beyond, wherein we are equals. Whitman asks: 
“What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the 
scores or hundreds of years between us ? Whatever it is, it 
avails not, — distance avails not, and place avails not.” 
In woman’s equality as a political or economic being, Whit¬ 
man seems less concerned; his eye is directed towards the 
opening future; woman’s equality with man’s lies in her 
spiritual aspirations, aim, and purpose. But he believes what¬ 
ever is done in life counts towards immortality. 
“I believe of all those men and women that fill’d the un-named lands, 
every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible to us. 
In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out of what 
he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinned, in life.” 
But Whitman tells of mutterings — of which he says, “We 
will not now stop to heed them here, but they must be heeded” 
— of something more revolutionary. “The day is coming 
when the deep questions of woman’s entrance amid the arenas 
of practical life, politics, the suffrage, etc., will not only be 
argued all round us, but may be put to decision and real ex¬ 
periment.” Then, as if heeding the insufficiency of our pre¬ 
sent state of affairs and conditions, he projects the “types of 
highest personality . . . entirely recast . . . from what the 
oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us. Of course, 
the old, undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully 
