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Tamoskaro-2 Directory 10
Page 05
Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all." And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."
Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter. If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand so great a drain even on so great a reserve? Probably there is not, but happily there can be no such panic, for even though the cultured classes may do so, the uncultured are too dull to have brains enough to commit such stupendous folly. It takes a long course of academic training to educate a man up to the standard which he must reach before he can entertain such questions seriously, and by a merciful dispensation of Providence, university training is almost as costly as it is unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on demonstration.
The night passed on, and though the king's mind was relieved, he suffered much bodily agony. In the morning, when he perceived that it was light, he asked the attendants to open the curtains, that he might see the sun for the last time. It gave him but a momentary pleasure, for he was restless and in great suffering. Some pains which he endured increased so much that it was decided to bleed him. The operation relieved the suffering, but exhausted the sufferer's strength so that he soon lost the power of speech, and lay afterward helpless and almost insensible, longing for the relief which now nothing but death could bring him. This continued till about noon, when he ceased to breathe.
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