“I tramp a perpetual journey, My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods. No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road, Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.” He who can bring to Whitman’s rugged and flowing lines anything like the sympathy and insight that beget them, will know what I mean. Our modern nature poets are holiday flower-gatherers beside this inspired astronomer, geologist, and biologist, all in one, sauntering the streets, loitering on the beach, roaming the mountains, or rapt and silent under the midnight skies. When, now, in my old age, I open his pages again and read the “Song of the Open Road,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The Song of the Broad-Axe,” “This Compost,” “Walt Whitman,” “Great are the Myths,” “Laws for Creation,” and scores of others, I seem to be present at the creation of worlds. I am in touch with primal energies. I am borne along by a tide of life and power that has no parallel elsewhere in literature. It is not so much mind as it is personality, not so much art as it is Nature, not so much poetry as it is the earth, the sky. Oh, the large, free handling, the naked grandeur, the elemental sympathy, the forthrightness, and the power! Not beauty alone, but meanings, unities, profundities; not merely the bow in the clouds, but the clouds also, and the sky, and the orbs beyond the clouds. A personal, sympathetic, interpretive attitude toward the whole of Nature, claiming it all for body and mind, drawing out its spiritual and æsthetic values, forging his laws for creation from it, trying his own work by its standards, and seeking to emulate its sanity, its impartiality, and its charity. Whitman wrote large the law of artistic productions which he sought to follow: “All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world; There shall be no subject too pronounced--all works shall illustrate the divine law of indirections. What do you suppose creation is? What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free, and own no superior? What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God? And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself? And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean? And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?”