All criticism of Whitman must begin with the fact that he was uneducated even to ignorance. He felt rather than thought. Of the intellectual life in the broader sense--science, analysis, patient investigation--he knew nothing. When he read he read tumultuously, without horizon, using his emotions and his half conceptions as interpreters. A parallel may be drawn between him and that other typical product of the era, Mrs. Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science cult. Both were mystics, almost pathologically so; both were electric with the urge of physical health; both were acted upon by the transcendental spirit of the era; both were utterly without humor; and both in all seriousness set about to establish a new conception of religion. I too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a Religion. To Whitman the religious leader of an era was its poet. He would broaden the conception of the Poet until he made of him the leader and the savior of his age. The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality, His insight and power encircle things and the human race, He is the glory and extract, thus far, of things, and of the human race. The singers do not beget--only THE POET begets, The singers are welcomed, understood, appear often enough--but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, Not every century, or every five centuries, has contained such a day, for all its names. With assurance really sublime he announced himself as this poet of the new era, this new prophet of the ages: Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived To be wrestled with. I know perfectly well my own egotism, I know my omnivorous words, and I cannot say any less, And would fetch you, whoever you are, flush with myself. He hails as comrade and fellow savior even Him who was crucified: We few, equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times, We, inclosers of all continents, all castes--allower of all theologies, Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men, We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers, nor anything that is asserted, We hear the bawling and din--we are reached at by divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side, They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade, Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and down, till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras, Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.