When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. His intellect is not so developed as his emotions. He cannot think; he can feel. And after all is not the essence of all poetry, of all the meanings of life, of the soul, of Nature in its message to man, a thing not of the intellect but of the sensitive spirit of man? VI Of Whitman's poetic form there is still much to learn. In its earlier phases there was a sprawliness about it that at times was almost fatal to poetic effects, but he grew more metric with every edition and more and more pruned out the worst of his lines, such for instance as this: Or, another time, in warm weather, out in a boat, to lift the lobster-pots, where they are sunk with heavy stones (I know the buoys). His lines are not prose, even the worst of them. There is a roll about them, a falling of the voice at stressed intervals, an alternate time-beat, crude at times, violated often, yet nevertheless an obedience to law. It is impossible for any poet, however lawless and apathetic to rules, to compose year after year without at last falling into a stereotyped habit of manner, and evolving a metric roll that is second nature. That Whitman was not conscious of any metric law within himself goes without saying. He believed that he was as free as the tides of the ocean and the waves that rolled among the rocks--lawless, unconfined. I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but I confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages--that they should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.[91] But a study of Whitman reveals the fact that certain laws _did_ more and more assume mastery over him. With every year the time-beat of his poems grew increasingly hexametric. One may go through his later poems and find on the average a full hexameter line on every page. I quote at random: To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me. How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother? Behold thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains.