[634] MSS. Diary. [635] _L. of G._, fly-leaf. CHAPTER XVIII AMONG THE PROPHETS With the completion of the main body of his work, and before we pass to the details of his last years in Camden, a brief digression into wider fields may perhaps be permissible. For Whitman's thought, though it is very consciously his, is interestingly related to that of the preceding century and of his own, and no study of him would be at all complete which left this fact out of consideration. Readers who prefer to follow the path of events will find it again in the next chapter. * * * * * While it is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the Essayist on Man and the Singer of Myself, they were at least agreed as to the proper subject for human study. Physically they were most dissimilar--Pope, a little, deformed, ivory-faced wit, all nerves and eyes; Whitman, a huge, high-complexioned, phlegmatic peasant-artisan. Between their thought lay the century of Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, of Washington, Robespierre and Napoleon. And their mental contrast was as marked as their physical. It is clearly indicated in the formal character of their work: Pope's, a mosaic of brilliant couplets; Whitman's, a choral or symphonic movement.[636] Wholly lacking in the intellectual dazzle of the Augustan wits, Whitman's strength lay rather in those naturalistically romantic regions of the imaginative world which in the eighteenth century were being rediscovered by certain provincial singers, the forerunners of the Lake-poets. In the verses of Scottish poets from Ramsay to Burns; in Macpherson's "Ossian," and, finally, in the work of two men who were Londoners but "with a difference"--the soul-revealing cries of Cowper and the lyric abandonment of Blake--there was restored to English poetry that emotional quality which had been banned and ousted by the self-conscious club-men of the eighteenth century.[637] Just as the passion of high conviction returns to English politics with Burke, and to English religion with Wesley, so it finds expression once again in the rhythmical impulse of _Lyrical Ballads_ and the _Songs of Innocence_. There is here a new feeling for beauty, a new sense of the emotional significance of Nature.