And then at last, paralyzed and helpless, his work done, the body he had gloried in slipping away from him, there came that magnificent outburst of faith and optimism that throws a glory over the whole of American poetry, the "Prayer of Columbus":
My terminus near,
The clouds already closing in upon me,
The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost,
I yield my ships to Thee.
My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
My brain feels rack'd, bewildered,
Let the old timbers part, I will not part,
I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,
Thee, Thee at least I know.
Sometime the poems of Whitman will be arranged in the order in which he wrote them, and then it will be seen that the poems by which he is chiefly judged—the chants of the body, the long catalogues of things (reduced greatly by the poet in his later editings), the barbaric yawp and the egotism—belong to only one brief period in his literary development; that in his later work he was the poet of the larger life of man, the most positive singer of the human soul in the whole range of English literature. If the earlier Whitman is the singer of a type of democracy that does not exist in America except as an abstract theory, the later Whitman is the singer of the universal heart of man. The Whitman that will endure emerged from the furnace of the Civil War. In his own words:
Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.[89]
And again,
I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged or been fashion'd or completed, from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than democratic America, and from the absolute triumph of the national Union arms.[90]
He is not always easy reading; he is not always consecutive and logical. He said himself that the key to his style was suggestiveness.
I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.
He is oracular; he talks darkly, like the priestess in the temple, in snatches and Orphic ejaculations, and we listen with eagerness. Had he been as clear and as consecutive as Longfellow he would not have had at all the vogue that has been his. Somehow he gives the impression constantly to his reader, as he gave it in earlier years to Thoreau, that there is something superhuman about him. He is a misty landscape illuminated by lightning flashes. We feel that we are near lofty mountains; now and then we catch glimpses of a snowy peak, but only for a moment. The fitful roll of the thunder excites us and the flashes sometimes terrify, and the whole effect of the experience is on the side of the feelings. There is little clear vision. Or, perhaps, a better figure: taking his entire work we have the great refuse heap of the universe. He shows it to us with eagerness; nothing disgusts him, nothing disconcerts him. Now he pulls forth a diamond, now a potsherd, and he insists that both are equally valuable. He is joyous at every return of the grappling hook. Are not all together in the heap; shall the diamond say to the potsherd, I am better than thou?