It is true that he has addressed woman as the mother or the equal mate of man, rather than as the maid unwed, as though his thought of sex transcended the limits usually assigned to it. I am persuaded that the explanation of this is to be found in the fact that Whitman's mystic consciousness had broken many of the barriers which have constricted the passion of sex too narrowly during past centuries. He heard all the deeps of life calling to one another and responding with passionate avowals of life's unity. The soul of the lover--as all the poets have been telling us since Dante's day--discovers its true self in the beloved person: but the soul of Whitman discovered itself as surely and as passionately in the Beloved World. The expression is so novel that it sounds well-nigh absurd to ears that do not "hear". But for those who can hear, Whitman's voice is all surcharged with the lover's passion; not less intense but larger in its sanity than the voices of other poets. Again we may justly urge that, in general, it was Woman as Madonna, rather than as Venus, whom he contemplated. Or shall we say he saw the Madonna in Venus, as Botticelli did? His love, when he wrote, was that of a man of middle life, in whom the yearning tenderness of fatherhood mingled with the other currents of passion. His vision beheld the Divine Child, without whom love itself is incomplete. For fatherhood and motherhood are seen by the insight of the poet to be implicit in the passion of sex, and it was impossible for Whitman, the seer, to think of one apart from the other. As a wife and a mother, Anne Gilchrist recognised the beauty and purity of Whitman's conception of love; and his book was to her like the presence of a great and wise comrade.[476] She was the first woman who had publicly recognised his purpose in these poems, and it was an act of no small heroism.[477] Whitman might well be moved by it. * * * * * [Illustration: WHITMAN AT ABOUT FIFTY] The _Selections_ had appeared in 1868, a year which also saw the publication[478] of O'Connor's tale, _The Carpenter_, in whose pages commences that legendary element in Whitman's story, which follows the advent of the more striking personalities. Here Whitman is confused with Christ, somewhat as was Francis by his followers, more than six centuries before. That such a thing should have been possible in the Whitman circle requires a few words of explanation. I have already described the poem in which he himself claims comradeship with "the Crucified".[479] The further assertion of such a claim inevitably fell to O'Connor, whose work was always marked by an element of vehemence and even of excess. Brilliant, generous, eloquent, he was oftener a fervid partisan than a safe critic.