“Yes; it is the spiritual use of what he saw that is his distinctive quality. I think he carries that at times to the utmost endurable limit—even to near touch of the absurd.”
“That may be so. I think the limits of acceptance depend on one’s moods. Of course, too minute notice in verse of natural peculiarities may be possible. Now, these colors—how could one put them in verse?”
“Oh, aunty, you forget:
‘A silver plane of fretted gold,
Set thick with shells of violet blue.’”
“That is mere description, Archie—good enough and true; but what I mean is that accurate description does not, as a rule, consist with poetry. The best of it seizes a single trait, and with it links some human emotion. You can’t catalogue in verse, as Walt Whitman does.”
“My dear old Walt!” said Lyndsay. “I am thankful for what he gives, and do not quarrel with what he does not. I am inclined to think that he will outlive some of his seeming betters. I have been more than once struck, in talking with him, by his entire unconsciousness of the fact that, while he believed himself to be the poet of the masses, he found his only readers among the most cultivated class.”
“Could I read him? You said once that I could not,” said Rose.
“He is hardly pueris et virginibusque, my dear; but his later editions are fairly expurgated of what had as well never been written. Anne will give you his great poem, ‘The Dream of Columbus,’ and ‘The Convict,’ and ‘My Captain,’ and ‘When Lilacs Bloom.’ A friend of North’s once gave Walt, through him, a check which he much needed, asking in return an autograph copy of ‘My Captain.’ He took the gift with entire simplicity, and sent two copies of that noble verse. He was the most innocently and entirely vain creature I ever knew. The perfect story of his vanity will, I fancy, never be written. It was past belief.”
“What a fine head he had a few years ago,” said Anne.