And each step of the way was a pure joy to him. "What a day!" he murmured, "what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul!" So rhapsodizing inwardly and drinking in the beauty of sight and sound, he proceeded, "still sauntering on, to the spring under the willows--musical as soft clinking glasses--pouring a sizeable stream, pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth-roof--gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly; meaning, saying something, of course (if one could only translate it.)" (_Specimen Days._) Here he sat down awhile and revelled in sheer joy of summer opulence. He enumerated to himself,--laying a store of lovely recollections for future reference in darker days,--"The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air--the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves, the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence: the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils,--and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue," (_Specimen Days_,) and, "from old habit, pencilled down from time to time, almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines, on the spot." Minutes like these were the seed time of his art, if that can be called art which was almost one with Nature. For Walt Whitman had, from the very outset, striven to obtain that fusion of identity with _Natura Benigna_, which, even if only momentary, bequeathes a lasting impression on the mind. He had always felt, with regard to his productions, that "There is a humiliating lesson one learns, in serene hours, of a fine day or night. Nature seems to look on all fixed-up poetry and art as something almost impertinent.... If I could indirectly show that we have met and fused, even if but only once, but enough--that we have really absorbed each other and understood each other,"--it sufficed him. Nothing less did: for he recognised that "after you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains? Nature remains: to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, changes of seasons--the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night." And, while confessing, "I cannot divest my appetite of literature, yet I find myself eventually trying it all by Nature--_first premises_ many call it, but really the crowning results of all, laws, tallies and proofs.... I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest,