“It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second.” He is filled with “the great thoughts of space and eternity,” and common things assume new meanings in his eyes: “I lie abstracted and hear the meanings of things and the reason of things. They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.” Who before Whitman ever drew his poetic, his æsthetic, and ethical standards from the earth, from the sexuality, from the impartiality of the earth, or his laws for creations from the earth? Only the wisest readers are prepared for their unliterary flavor: “I swear there can be no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth. There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborates the theory of the earth. No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth, Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth.” We all see in Whitman, as we see in Nature, what we bring the means of seeing. Readers of him are likely to see their own limitations for the limitations of Whitman. It is as if we thought that the length of our sounding-line was the measure of the ocean’s depth. It may be so, but it is not always so. A man of strict moral and ethical ideas, according to conventional standards, will find Whitman rank with original sin. Is not Nature rank with the same form of evil? Whitman did not shrink from natural tests. Naturalism was the essence of his religion. “Nothing out of place is good, nothing in its place is bad.” But the good in Nature is vastly more than the evil, else you and I would not be here, and the good in Whitman is vastly more than the evil, or he would have been forgotten long ago. Evil, as we use the term, attends all great things. Evil--some man’s evil--comes out of the sunshine, the rains, the protecting snows. One of our poets objects to Whitman’s saying that evil is just as perfect as good. Whitman does not say it is just as desirable, but just as perfect. Are not these things we call evil perfect--snakes, nettles, thorns, volcanoes, earthquakes? Is not a fungus as perfect as a rose?--a toad as perfect as a bird? Each obeys its own law. The germs of typhoid fever and of pneumonia are just as perfect as the germs that favor us. Whitman said: “I permit to speak at every hazard Nature without check, with original energy.” The hazards are great, but the stakes are great also. Readers who cannot stand an utterance of this sort should go to Pollock’s “Course of Time,” or Young’s “Night Thoughts,” or Dr. Holland’s “Bitter Sweet.”