WOMAN AND FREEDOM IN WHITMAN 391 
of George Sand, exquisite passages — living entities from 
woman’s heart and soul — strengthen such a belief. 
But to return to Freedom. Whitman, on this point, is found 
firm, strong, and imperative, and as the harbinger of contest 
for liberty he goes forth and cries out to the cities and to the 
States, “Resist much, obey little.” He sings of war, — “a 
longer and greater one than any,” with “victory deferr’d and 
wavering,” but the cause as certain as if won, “the field the 
world, for life and death, for the Body and for the eternal 
Soul.” Lo, he comes, and chants “the chant of battles”! 
In Paris, last summer, as I stood before the large canvas 
of Rochegrosse, where the artist tells the story of human an¬ 
guish, of the struggling pyramid of humanity on the crags 
of suffering and misery, my imagination was filled with 
the smoke-laden air of the factory-strown lowlands, —- material 
contest, competition, mistaken aims, beauty slain, all being 
portrayed as futile, leading nowhere, the only realities being 
the aspirations toward the ideal, which few ever gain foot¬ 
hold on the tapering rock-summit to view from afar, — then 
occurred to me Whitman’s words, “I have no chair, no church, 
no philosophy. I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, ex¬ 
change. But each man and each woman of you I lead upon 
a knoll.” Upon this “knoll,” —Whitman’s outlook towards 
a promised land,— each man and each woman of us meet 
to gaze upon vistas of equality and freedom. 
Cast aside fear, there is no danger that all may not reach 
the goal. Whitman tells us that he has in mind all through 
his book the average man and woman, “the working man 
and the working woman.” 1 
It is for them and ourselves, when we have reached the 
knoll, to take up the staff and scrip and journey farther, be- 
1 Curious as it may seem, it is in what are call’d the poorest, lowest char¬ 
acters, you will sometimes, nay generally, find glints of the most sublime vir¬ 
tues, eligibilities, heroism. Then it is doubtful whether the State is to be saved, 
either in the monotonous long run, or in tremendous special crises, by its good 
people only. When the storm is deadliest, and the disease most imminent, 
help often comes from strange quarters, — (the homeopathic motto, you re¬ 
member, cure the bite with a hair of the same dog). —Whitman’s Prose : “ The 
Tramp and Strike Question.” 
