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156 And this is not eclecticism: it is universalism, a complete acceptance of the religious experience, whatever its form. For Walt Whitman feels the need of religion, and asserts that he comes to bring us a religion:

But what is the essence of Whitman’s religion? In one of his songs he confesses the gods of his belief: the ideal man, death, the soul, time, space. Yet his polytheism is only apparent: his mind is unitarian. All things are one: this unity may be called soul, it may be called Walt Whitman, but it may better be called God. God is all and is everywhere: I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,