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“The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;
All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you;
All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are tallied in you;
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same:
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?
The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums.

“All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
the arches and cornices?)

“All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments;
It is not the violins and the cornets–it is not the oboe, nor
the beating drums–nor the score of the baritone singer singing
his sweet romanza–nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of
the women’s chorus,
It is nearer and farther than they.”

Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and social distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in “Leaves of Grass” that have caused so much abuse and fury,–the allusions to sexual acts and organs,–the momentary contemplation of man as the perpetuator of his species. Many good judges, who have followed Whitman thus far, stop here and refuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed in this part, he has failed in the rest. It is of a piece with the whole. He has felt in his way the same necessity as that which makes the anatomist or the physiologist not pass by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his typical personage. All the passages and allusions that come under this head have a scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as poetry always must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead of dead and analytic. There is nothing of the forbidden here, none of those sweet morsels that we love to roll under the tongue, such as are found in Byron and Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante. If the fact is not lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far- reaching laws of maternity and paternity, through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it is irredeemable, and one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar and mean.

Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-class poems, no matter what their plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind, its period, its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and cumbrous Hindu epics contribute their special types of both man and woman, impossible except from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity. Out of Homer, after all his gorgeous action and events, the distinct personal identity, the heroic and warlike chieftain of Hellas only permanently remains. In the same way, when the fire and fervor of Shakespeare’s plots and passions subside, the special feudal personality, as lord or gentleman, still towers in undying vitality. Even the Sacred Writings themselves, considered as the first great poems, leave on record, out of all the rest, the portraiture of a characteristic Oriental Man. Far different from these (and yet, as he says, “the same old countenance pensively looking forth,” and “the same red running blood”), “Leaves of Grass” and “Two Rivulets” also bring their contribution; nay, behind every page that is the main purport,–to outline a New World Man and a New World Woman, modern, complete, democratic, not only fully and nobly intellectual and spiritual, but in the same measure physical, emotional, and even fully and nobly carnal.