Take any of Whitman's irregular-flowing lines, and clip and trim them, and
compress them into artificial verse-forms, and what have we gained to make
up for what we have lost? Take his lines called "Reconciliation," for
instance:--
"Word over all beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin."