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LITERARY PAPERS 
frames as Ibsen and Browning have here and there placed 
their womanly creations in. 
Of a spiritual womanly ideal, Whitman has reached in 
these words his highest one: “Prophetic joys of better, loftier 
love’s ideals, the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect com¬ 
rade.” In the passages cited, however, where he treats of 
woman in the lower planes of life, he has been full and clear 
in his utterance. 
Woman divested of her corporeal attributes as a reality in 
comradeship, has not become a part of the poet’s theme. And 
the vast areas of the regions of the super-sensuous he has not 
explored with her. Whitman has not met woman on a plane 
of reciprocity where truth, liberty, and love re-echo from soul 
to soul here on earth or in thoughts of death, and where the 
soul of man and woman are entwined and live as one enfold¬ 
ing form. Nor has Whitman been touched by the quivering 
light from that unseen and far-away realm where thoughts 
on life and immortality pass from hand to heart, from lips 
to soul, to that blessed unity awaiting man and woman, which 
is eternity’s own! 
But this silence of Whitman’s mind is not inharmonious 
with his plan. In his writings he distinctly says that he is 
describing his own personality, the personality of its own 
time and place. And there are chords of harmony in these 
relations of the sexes which Whitman never touched or 
heard. 1 
To me, Whitman’s idea of comradeship even does not 
clearly stand for the mutual development of man towards 
woman or woman towards man, which may exist and be the 
outcome of a state resting on perfect freedom and liberty. It 
may be that woman herself alone is capable of giving the 
truest utterances about herself; and in turning to the pages 
1 Man and woman are parts of one and the same humanity, “the human 
integral,” — each brings something which is specially pertinent to individual 
sex. Hope for humanity in the future would seem to rest on the cooperation of 
the sexes. This cooperation may or may not be based on unity in aspiration 
and reciprocal sympathy, but when these elements arise, they do not inter¬ 
fere, on the contrary they aid the force of cooperation for the good of others. 
Whitman’s position towards love in this broadest sense is a negative one. 
