"The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs; The mother condemned for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on; The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, covered with sweat; The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck--the murderous buckshot and the bullets; All these I feel, or am." Seeking to express the sense of knowing and especially of _feeling_, and the bigness and broadness of life, the scorn of petty aims and strife; in short, that interior perception which Illumination brings, he says: "Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practised so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems; You shall possess the good of the earth and sun--there are millions of suns left; You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books; You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me; You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end; But I do not talk of the beginning nor the end. * * * * * "There was never any more inception than there is now; Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now." A perception of eternity as an ever-present reality is one of the characteristic signs of the inception of the new birth. Birth and death become nothing more nor yet less, than events in the procedure of eternal life; age becomes merely a graduation garment; God and heaven are not separated from us by any reality; they become every-day facts. Whitman tells of the annihilation of any sense of separateness from his soul side, in the following words: "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul." He did not confound his mortal consciousness, the lower _manas_, with the higher--the soul; neither did he recognize an impassable gulf between them. While admittedly ascending to the higher consciousness from the lower, Whitman refused to follow the example of the saints and sages of old, and mortify or despise the lower self--the manifestation. He had indeed _struck the balance_; he recognized his dual nature, each in its rightful place and with its rightful possessions, and refused to abase either "I am" to the other. He literally "rendered unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's," by claiming for the flesh the purity and the cleanliness of God's handiwork.