But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”
And to any who find that dust but a poor immortality, he would say with Schopenhauer, “Oho! do you know, then, what dust is?” The vast chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that is rooted in what we call corruption, the life that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly uttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse that is good manure to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of melons; or again, in the noble elegy, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on those who died during the war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” Whitman has celebrated death—“that strong and delicious word”—with strange tenderness; and never has the loveliness of death been sung in a more sane and virile song than the solemn death-carol in “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed”:
“Dark mother, always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
“Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,