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 ture, too; and must have them." A passage by no means devoid of political sagacity.

Thirdly, Whitman is not in the least content as a final term of progress with the material civilization which he expects and demands as the stage following the founding of fundamental institutions and laws. "The fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale," he declares with emphasis, "resides altogether in the future." Like most imaginative writers who have striven to present a vast and complex vision, he has been grievously misunderstood. His great songs are songs of faith, winged with anticipative ecstasy, outflying the literal and the humdrum, soaring down that far vista at the end of which a "sublime and serious Religious Democracy" will sternly take command. He has been described as a noisy braggart about himself and his country; but he is complacent with hope, not fulfillment. What he is bragging about is God, that power not ourselves working through man and nature and mysteriously bringing vast designs to pass in spite of all that the almost infinite wickedness and ignorance of man can do to thwart him.

Finally, Whitman would have been hanged by a canny council of workmen because of the germs of a new aristocracy lurking in his "great persons," his powerful free individuals, and pervading, indeed, all that he says or sings. He is a reader of newspapers and passes for a shallow fellow with those who do not also observe that he is a de-