"Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you;
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you, and the leaves to rustle
for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you."
We are housed in social usages and laws, we are sheltered and warmed and
comforted by conventions and institutions and numberless traditions;
their value no one disputes. But for purposes of his own Whitman ignores
them all; he lets in upon us the free and maybe raw air of the great
out-of-doors of absolute nature; his standards are not found inside of any
four walls; he contemplates life, and would quicken it in its
fundamentals; his survey is from a plane whence our arts and refinements
and petty distinctions disappear. He sees the evil of the world no less
necessary than the good; he sees death as a part of life itself; he sees
the body and the soul as one; he sees the spiritual always issuing from
the material; he sees not one result at last lamentable in the universe.