The Walt Whitman Archive
Complete Prose Works
It will be difficult for the future—judging by his books,
personal dis-sympathies, &c.,—to account for the deep hold this
author has taken on the
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present age, and the way he has color'd its method and thought. I
am certainly at a loss to account for it all as affecting myself. But there could be
no view, or even partial picture, of the middle and latter part of our Nine-teenth
century, that did not markedly include Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many
others, literary productions, works of art, personal identities, events,) there has
been an impalpable something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better
text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living
man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home
use. Let us see what they amount to those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful
analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite and sincere mind of
Europe.