If his family anticipated any change in his ways when the book was out, they were doomed to disappointment. The new task was but begun; the methods approved themselves to his mind and were pursued. He had weighed everything over again that summer, as soon as the book was out, going away to the eastern shore of Long Island for months of thought and solitude.[160] * * * * * As one turns the ninety broad pages of the volume, with their large type, their long flowing lines, their odd punctuation and occasional slips in orthography, every detail telling of the individuality behind it, one feels a little of what it must have meant to its maker. Five times, they say,[161] he wrote and re-wrote, made and un-made it, and looking back it seemed as though for seven years it had been struggling with him for utterance. He had written tales and verses with the others, but this book he knew was different from them all. It was not so much his writing as himself. It was a man, and, withal, a new sort of man. For better or worse it was Walt Whitman, a figure familiar enough to the common people of Brooklyn and New York, familiar and beloved--he was not unconscious of his exceptional power of attraction[162]--but a Walt Whitman whom, as yet, they understood very little, who had, indeed, but recently come to an understanding of himself, and who was now approaching to speak with them. Here is the frank declaration of himself, which he proffers to all. Now, at last, we shall understand one another, he seems to say. It was the old, old need for expression, the ultimate and deepest necessity of man, which urged him to his task and made its publication possible. Self-revelation is, of course, continuous and inevitable upon its unconscious side. It is only when it becomes a deliberate act that it astonishes the beholder to outcries of admiration or indignant horror. Now the passion that overwhelms the poet is near akin to the lover's, for he is a lover whose heart is transfigured by the presence of Beauty, the Beloved, immanent in his world. And only by a naked avowal can such passion be satisfied. There are those, of course, who regard every self-revelation as an immodesty, and who will and do avert their eyes from all passion, crying shame. But some at least of the others, who are well aware of the weakness of words, and know how few can use them perfectly, will reverently approach such a confession as Whitman's; not, indeed, as if it were that of a young girl, but as that of a man, naïve, yet virile, and of heroic sanity. And if they feel any shame they will frankly acknowledge it to be their own. There is a kind of egoism which all self-revelation pre-supposes--the consciousness of possessing something supremely worthy of giving. This glorious pride is not incompatible with the profoundest humility, for it is divine, like the "I am" of Jehovah, the egoism of God. * * * * *