America has had the shaping of Walt Whitman, and he repays the filial debt with a love that knows no stint. Her vast lands with their varied, brilliant climes and rich products, her political scheme, her achievements and her failures, all have contributed to make these poems what they are both directly and indirectly. Above all has that great conflict, the Secession War, found voice in him. And if the reader would understand the true causes and nature of that war, ostensibly waged between North and South, but underneath a tussle for supremacy between the good and the evil genius of America (for there were just as many secret sympathizers with the secession-slave-power in the North as in the South) he will find the clue in the pages of Walt Whitman. Rarely has he risen to a loftier height than in the poem which heralds that volcanic upheaval:-- "Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier and fiercer sweep! Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour'd what the earth gave me; Long I roam'd the woods of the north--long I watch'd Niagara pouring; I travel'd the prairies over, and slept on their breast-- I cross'd the Nevadas, I cross'd the plateaus; I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail'd out to sea; I sail'd through the storm, I was refresh'd by the storm; I watch'd with joy the threatening maws of the waves; I mark'd the white combs where they career'd so high, curling over; I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds; Saw from below what arose and mounted (O superb! O wild as my heart, and powerful!) Heard the continuous thunder, as it bellow'd after the lightning; Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky; --These, and such as these, I, elate, saw--saw with wonder, yet pensive and masterful; All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me; Yet there with my soul I fed--I fed content, supercilious.