Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/226

196 theory of unvarying realism. Nature's poet must adopt her own method; and she hides the processes that are unpleasant to see or consider. Whitman often dwells upon the under side of things,—the decay, the ferment, the germination, which nature conducts in secret, though out of them she produces new life and beauty. Lanier, with equal fidelity, avoids—a refined and spiritual genius needs must avoid—this irritating mistake. His taste made him an open critic of the robust poet of democracy: but it is manifest that the two (as near and as different as Valentine and Orson) were moving in the same direction; that is, for an escape from conventional trammels to something free, from hackneyed timebeats to an assimilation of nature's larger rhythm,—to limitless harmonies suggested by the voices of her winds and the diapason of her ocean billows. The later portions of Whitman's life-work, his symphonies of "starry night," of death and immortality, have chords that would have thrilled Lanier profoundly.

In certain poems which have been humorously True realism is not a statement of facts, compared to "catalogues," Whitman suplies an example of the uselessness of a display of mere facts. Facts, despite Carlyle's eulogy upon them, are not "the one" and only "pabulum." They are the stones heaped about the mouth of the well in whose depth truth reflects the sky.