Whitman’s attitude toward Nature stands out in contrast to that of all other poets, ancient or modern. It was not that of the poet who draws his themes from Nature, or makes much of the gentler and fairer forms of wood and field, spring and summer, shore and mountain, as has been so largely the custom of poets from Virgil down. Take all the Nature lyrics and idyls out of English and American poetry, and how have you impoverished it, how many names would suffer! Nor does Whitman’s attitude in any degree conform to the worshipful attitude of Wordsworth and so many other poets since his time. He did not humanize Nature or read himself into it; he did not adorn it as a divinity; he did not see through it as through a veil to spiritual realities beyond, as Emerson so often does; he did not gather bouquets, nor distill the wild perfumes in his pages; he did not fill the lap of earth with treasures not her own--all functions of true poetry, we must admit, and associated with great names. Yet he made more of Nature than any other poet has done; he saw deeper meanings in her for purposes of both art and life; but it was Nature as a whole--not the parts, not the exceptional phases, but the total scheme and unfolding of things. He sings more in terms of personality, of democracy, of nationalism, of sex, of immortality, of comradeship; more of the general, the continuous, the world-wide; more of wholes and less of parts, more of man and less of men. His religion takes no account of sects and creeds, but arises from the contemplation of the soul, of the Eternal, of the universe. We do not get the solace and the companionship with rural nature in Whitman that we get in the modern nature poets. With them we admire the “violet by a mossy stone,” or the pretty shell on the seashore; with Whitman we saunter on the hills, or inhale the salt air of the seashore, or our minds open under the spread of the midnight skies--always the large, the elemental, the processional, the modern. The scholarly, the elaborated, the polished, the architectural, the Tennysonian perfume and technique, the Wordsworthian sweet rusticity and affiliation with fells and groves, the Emersonian mysticism and charm of the wild and the sequestered, were not for him or in him; nor the epic grandeur of Milton, the dramatic power of Shakespeare, nor, usually, the lyric thrill of many of the minor poets. You embark on an endless quest with Whitman; not on a picnic, nor a “day off,” but a day-by-day and a night-by-night journey through the universe: