putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied soul giving its verdict." (_Specimen Days._) He was "so afraid," as he phrased it, "of dropping what smack of outdoors or sun or starlight might cling to the lines--I dared not try to meddle with or smooth them." To be "made one with Nature," in a deeper sense than ever any man yet had known, was, in short, his ideal,--and, one may say, his achievement. For the verdict of the average person, vacant of _his_ glorious gains, he did not care. Regardless of ridicule, calumny, contumely, he had pursued his own way to his own goal: till he was able at last to realize his dream of-- Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature, Master of all, or mistress of all--aplomb in the midst of irrational things. And now he was an old man, to look upon,--yet a man surcharged with electric vigour and daily renewing his physical strength from the fountains of eternal youth. He was just as full of _élan_, of enterprise, of the glorious hunger for adventure, as when first he had proclaimed,-- Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose. Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless, To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights, To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to, Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys; To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it, To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you--however long, but it stretches and waits for you; To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither. (_Song of the Open Road._) The big grey man expanded almost visibly in the sun-steeped air, as he absorbed the exquisite minutiæ of the green dell into his mind, and assimilated the music of the wind and stream. Sound of any sort had a powerfully emotional effect upon him. It was not mere fancy on Whitman's part that "he and Wagner made one music." With music on the most colossal scale his poems are fraught from end to end: and while their technical form may be less finished, less perfected, than those of other authors,--while they have less melody, they have the multitudinous harmony, the superb architectonics, the choral and symphonic movement of the noblest masters. "Such poems as _The Mystic Trumpeter_, _Out of the Cradle_, _Passage to India_, have the genesis and exodus of great musical compositions." And to many auditors, the "vast elemental sympathy" of this unique personality can only be compared to that of Beethoven, whom he said he had "discovered as a new meaning in music:" Beethoven, by whom he allowed he "had been carried out of himself, seeing, hearing wonders:" Beethoven, who, like himself, sought inspiration continuously in the magic and mystery of Nature.