Let me say at once that, whatever else “Leaves of Grass” may be, it is not poetry as the world uses that term. It is an inspired utterance, but it does not fall under any of the usual classifications of poetry. Lovers of Whitman no more go to him for poetry than they go to the ocean for the pretty shells and pebbles on the beach. They go to him for contact with his spirit; to be braced and refreshed by his attitude toward life and the universe; for his robust faith, his world-wide sympathies, for the breadth of his outlook, and the wisdom of his utterances. Whitman is first and last a seer and a philosopher, but his philosophy is incarnated in a man; it is fluid and alive; it breathes and talks, and loves and breeds; it nurses the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals; it makes him the friend and brother of all types of humanity, of the outcast woman not less than of the man or woman of perfect blood: “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you. Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you. * * * * * “Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid, You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, For none more than you are the present and the past, For none more than you is immortality.” My studies of nature and of the universe help me to understand Whitman much more than does my reading of literature itself. Whitman is rapt and thrilled when he looks up to the midnight sky. His very style is orbicular and concentric. The scientific aspects of astronomy do not engage him for a moment, any more than they did the old Hebrew prophets; his science becomes human emotion. He is the human soul matching itself against the starry hosts, coping with them and absorbing them: “This day before dawn I ascended the hill and look’d at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?_ And my spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond._” Is there not more than astronomy in these passages? “I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I can see multiplied as high as I can cypher edges but the rim of the farther system. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward. My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels, He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.” Again he says: