Page:A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman - The Radical, May, 1870.djvu/6

 how; whose songs are the breath of a glad, strong, beautiful life, nourished sufficingly, kindled to unsurpassed intensity and greatness by the gifts of the present.

"O the joy of my soul leaning poised on itself,—receiving identity through materials, and loving them,—observing characters, and absorbing them! O my soul vibrated back to me from them!

"O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides! The leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds, the moist, fresh stillness of the woods, The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak, and all through the forenoon.

"O to realize space! The plenteousness of all—that there are no bounds; To emerge, and be of the sky—of the sun and moon and the flying clouds, as one with them.

"O the joy of suffering,— To struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted, To be entirely alone with them—to find how much one can stand!"

I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness; to pluck it out of "each moment and whatever happens;" to find that one can ride as gay and buoyant on the angry, menacing, tumultuous waves of life as on those that glide and glitter under a clear sky; that it is not defeat and wretchedness which come out of the storm of adversity, but strength and calmness.

See, again, in the pieces gathered together under the title "Calamus," and elsewhere, what it means for a man to love his fellow-man. Did you dream it before? These "evangel-poems of comrades and of love" speak, with the abiding, penetrating power of prophecy, of a "new and superb friendship;" speak not as beautiful dreams, unrealizable aspirations to be laid aside in sober moods, because they breathe out what now glows within the poet's own breast, and flows out in action toward the men around him. Had ever any land before her poet, not only to