Documents increase around the great and mysterious figure of Whitman, but they add little to his greatness and take away little from his mystery. The two volumes called _The Gathering of the Forces_ contain after all only ephemeral material which Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn _Daily Eagle_ during his editorship in 1846-47 and which, though important because by him, would be less important if it were by any one else. And it might have been by almost any one else. Generally sensible, occasionally rather noble, now and then eloquent, often symptomatic of the prophet who was to come, these editorials and essays and book reviews are most of the time perfunctory and commonplace. Here Whitman loses himself in trivial political rows, echoes conventional opinions, scrambles up to a few peaks of originality with obvious effort. The demands of his occupation perhaps account for this; and yet at that very period he was beginning to undergo the spiritual upheaval which seems to have taken place in him during 1847-48 and out of which he emerged with his loins girded for the mighty race. Something of the nature of that upheaval appears in the manuscript notebooks lately published for the first time in _The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_. What Whitman wrote for the _Daily Eagle_ came, one may say, from the top of his head; in his notebooks he set down the record of dim perturbations which were then going on in his very spirit, his very tissue. The moment when Whitman found his wings and dared them is the most interesting moment in his entire career. There the mystery of the poet centres. He who had once screamed with the spread-eagle now proposed to “sky-lark with God.” His excursion to New Orleans and back in 1848 does not sufficiently explain his awakening, much as it stirred him to wonder at the body of his land; neither does the troubled love which may then have entered his life and have shaken him out of his established routines. Some change was taking place in him, some annunciation, which roused the man into the seer. What are the actual causes and processes of that change no one yet knows how to explain. It may be God, it may be glands; it is the deep, unseen behaviour of genius. I am habitually at a loss to know why so few critics of Whitman have paid due attention to what he himself reveals in his poems concerning the crucial moments in his growth. Is it because he dramatizes those moments with such fierce intensity that the biography in them is neglected? He is unmistakably explicit in his account of the experience reported in the fifth section of the _Song of Myself_, of his experience with what he called his Soul: