[231] men; but he was early inebriated with two potent draughts — himself and his country:--
One's self I sing, a simple separate poem,With these words, two of them French, his collected poems open, and to these he has always been true. They have brought with them a certain access of power, and they have also implied weakness. We cannot attribute final and complete acceptance to any poet in whom the emotion of high and ideal love between the sexes has no visible place. When Thoreau says of Whitman, “He does not celebrate love at all; it is as if the beasts spoke,” 1 the verdict seems to be final. Not only has he given us no love poem, in the ordinary use of the term, but it is as hard to conceive of his writing one as of his chanting a serenade beneath the window of his mistress. This not only separates him from the poets of thoroughly ideal emotion like Poe, but from those, like Rossetti, whose passion, though it may incarnate itself in the body, has its sources in the soul.
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En Masse.