monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen." For Whitman the ideal individual of America—America's ideal man—is to absorb into his soul an almost boundless range of social life—all the sights and sounds of Nature and animals; "his spirit responds to his country's spirit; he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes—Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, the blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland, the growths of pine and cedar and cypress and hickory, forests coated with transparent ice, and icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind."[1]
There is a strange magnificence in this democratic individualism, so prodigious in its width and depth—in the social sympathies, in the personal consciousness of equality, in the fellowship with Nature's mighty life, of these democratic "comrades, there in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim." Far indeed have they passed from the comradeship of the clan, far from the citizenship of the city commonwealth, far from the castes of the East, far from the communes and seigneurs of the West; yet they feel not wholly disunited with the "garnered clusters of ages, that men and women like them grew up and travelled their course and passed on."
- ↑ Preface to Leaves of Grass.
