"I sent my soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd, "I myself am Heav'n and Hell:
"Heav'n but the vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on Fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire."
From this melancholy attempt to offer us Epicureanism as a complete account of life, overshadowed as it is by the gloom of the Infinite which the man who stakes his all on momentary pleasure feels doomed to forego, it is a relief to turn to men who strike cheerfully and firmly the Epicurean note; but pass instantly on to blend it with sterner notes and larger views of life, in which it plays its essential, yet strictly subordinate part.
Of all the men who thus strike scattered Epicurean notes, without attempting the impossible task of making a harmonious and satisfactory tune out of them, our American Pagan, Walt Whitman, is the best example.
"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.
"O the joy of manly self-hood!
To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,
To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic,
To look with calm gaze or with flashing eye,
To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,
To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.
"O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
To meet life as a powerful conqueror,
No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.
"For not life's joys alone I sing, repeating—the joy of death!
The beautiful touch of death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons,
Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn'd, or render'd to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth.
"O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys."
Whitman, with this wild ecstasy, to be sure is an Epicurean and something more. Indeed, pure Epicureanism, unmixed with better elements, is rather hard to find in modern literature. One other hymn, by Robert Louis Stevenson, likewise adds to pure Epicureanism a note of strenuous intensity in the great task of happiness which was foreign to the more easy-going form of the ancient doctrine. In Stevenson Epicureanism is only a flavour to more substantial viands.