He carries the process of identification too far at times, leading to results that would be disgusting were they not laughably grotesque. Whitman makes no reservations on the score of taste. This doctrine of the unity of being and experience is comprehensive, not limited to human life; the brute and insentient existences are included as well. For a statement of Whitman’s creed take the poem beginning: ‘There was a child went forth.’ If a busy man were ambitious to know something about Whitman’s poetry and had only a minimum of time to give to the subject (like Franklin when he undertook to post up on revealed religion), one would not hesitate to commend to his notice this poem as one of the first to be read. The theme is contained in the four introductory lines. All that follows is an amplification of a single thought:-- There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. Every object grows incorporate with the child, an essential inseparable part of him,--the early lilacs, the noisy brood of the barnyard, people, home, the family usages, doubts even (doubts ‘whether that which appears is so, or is it all flashes and specks?’), the streets, the shops, the crowd surging along, shadows and mist, and boats and waves, The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in, The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud, These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day. The idea has another setting in ‘Salut au Monde,’ Walt Whitman’s brotherly wave of the hand to the whole world. It is a vision of kingdoms and nations, comprehensive, detailed; it is geography and the catalogue raised to the dignity of eloquence. Latitude and longitude and the hot equator ‘banding the bulge of the earth’ acquire new meaning in this strange chant. The poet hears the myriad sound of the life of all peoples:-- I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque, I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear the responsive bass and soprano, * * * * * I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms, I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans, I hear the tale of the divine life and the bloody death of the beautiful God the Christ, I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars, adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three thousand years ago.