And now he was an old man, to look upon,—yet a man surcharged with electric vigour and daily renewing his physical strength from the fountains of eternal youth. He was just as full of élan, of enterprise, of the glorious hunger for adventure, as when first he had proclaimed,—
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys;
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you—however long, but it stretches and waits for you;
To see no being, not God's or any, but you also go thither.
(Song of the Open Road.)
The big grey man expanded almost visibly in the sun-steeped air, as he absorbed the exquisite minutiæ of the green dell into his mind, and assimilated the music of the wind and stream. Sound of any sort had a powerfully emotional effect upon him. It was not mere fancy on Whitman's part that "he and Wagner made one music." With music on the most colossal scale his poems are fraught from end to end: and while their technical form may be less finished, less perfected, than those of other authors,—while they have less melody, they have the multitudinous harmony, the superb architectonics, the choral and symphonic movement of the noblest masters. "Such poems as The Mystic Trumpeter, Out of the Cradle, Passage to India, have the genesis and exodus of great musical compositions." And to many auditors, the "vast elemental sympathy" of this unique personality can only be compared to that of Beethoven, whom he said he had "discovered as a new meaning in music:" Beethoven, by whom he allowed he "had been carried out of himself, seeing, hearing wonders:" Beethoven, who, like himself, sought inspiration continuously in the magic and mystery of Nature.
THE LUMBERMEN'S CAMP.
Lumbermen in their winter camp, day-break in the woods, stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,
The glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song, the natural life of the woods, the strong day's work,
The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs, and the bear-skin.
(Song of the Broad-Axe).
And thus, all Whitman's finest poems have a processional air, like the evolution of some great symphony—a pageantry of sound, so to speak, which whirls one forward like a leaf upon a resistless stream. Sometimes he is superbly triumphant, as in his inaugural Song of Myself: