only permanently remains.  In the same way, when the fire and fervor of Shakespeare’s plots and passions subside, the special feudal personality, as lord or gentleman, still towers in undying vitality.  Even the Sacred Writings themselves, considered as the first great poems, leave on record, out of all the rest, the portraiture of a characteristic Oriental Man.  Far different from these (and yet, as he says, “the same old countenance pensively looking forth,” and “the same red running blood"), “Leaves of Grass” and “Two Rivulets” also bring their contribution; nay, behind every page that is the main purport,—­to outline a New World Man and a New World Woman, modern, complete, democratic, not only fully and nobly intellectual and spiritual, but in the same measure physical, emotional, and even fully and nobly carnal.

An acute person once said to me, “As I read and re-read these poems, I more and more think their inevitable result in time must be to produce

       ‘A race of splendid and savage old men,’

of course dominated by moral and spiritual laws, but with volcanoes of force always alive beneath the surface.”

And still again:  One of the questions to be put to any poem assuming a first-class importance among us—­and I especially invite this inquiry toward “Leaves of Grass”—­is, How far is this work consistent with, and the outcome of, that something which secures to the race ascendency, empire, and perpetuity?  There is in every dominant people a germ, a quality, an expansive force, that, no matter how it is overlaid, gives them their push and their hold upon existence,—­writes their history upon the earth, and stamps their imprint upon the age.  To what extent is your masterpiece the standard-bearer of this quality,—­helping the race to victory? helping me to be more myself than I otherwise would?

III

Not the least of my poet’s successes is in his thorough assimilation of the modern sciences, transmuting them into strong poetic nutriment, and in the extent to which all his main poems are grounded in the deepest principles of modern philosophical inquiry.

Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded upon fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance, that, however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could not keep if we had.  The bump of wonder and the feeling of the marvelous,—­a kind of half-pleasing fear, like that of children in the dark or in the woods,—­were largely operative with the old poets, and I believe are necessary to any eminent success in this field; but they seem nearly to have died out of the modern mind, like organs there is no longer any use for.  The poetic temperament has not yet adjusted itself to the new lights, to science, and to the vast fields and expanses opened up in the physical cosmos by astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual