“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers.” Yet this mystical experience, which has been often noted, is in no respect more illuminating than the poetical experience of which Whitman tells quite as explicitly in _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. In that supreme song of separation he not only gives voice to bereavement in the guise of a bird’s wailing for its lost mate by the seashore: he also records the sudden genesis of his consciousness that he was a poet, “the outsetting bard of love.” “Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,) Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me? For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you, Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder, and more sorrowful than yours, A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.” Awakened to his function, however, and vowed to be the singer of death, Whitman had yet to find a mode of utterance. He would not find it among traditional modes because he was wedded to the conception of a new democratic aesthetic; he could not respond to current rhythms because he was too stoutly original. What happened he makes clear enough in _Proud Music of the Storm_. The poet lies in his “lonesome slumber-chamber” haunted by the rhythms of life: “Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies, Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains, Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras, You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert, Blending with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.” Thither come to him the strophes of love, of martial enterprises, of folk-dances, of the hymns of religions, till he is so shaken that “Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,) Fill me with all the voices of the universe, Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also, The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances, Utter, pour in, for I would take them all.