The Walt Whitman Archive
Complete Prose Works
The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics, including the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the mind of man has brought up here—and always will. Here, at least, of whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause, too, is unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in this field though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage, or royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great Olympic games—will be dearest to humanity, and their works, however esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The altitude of literature and poetry has always been religion—and always will be. The Indian Vedas, the Nackas of Zoroaster, the Talmud of the Jews, the Old Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato's works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro, and so on toward our own day, to Swedenborg, and to the invaluable contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel—these, with such poems only in which, (while singing well of persons and events, of the passions of man, and the shows of the material universe,) the religious tone, the consciousness of mystery, the recognition of the future, of the unknown, of Deity over and under all, and of the divine purpose, are never absent, but indirectly give tone to all—exhibit literature's real heights and elevations, towering up like the great mountains of the earth.
Standing on
this ground the last, the highest, only permanent ground—and sternly
criticising, from it, all works, either of the literary, or any art, we have
peremptorily to dismiss every pretensive production, however fine its esthetic or
intellectual points, which violates or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the
central divine idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in the
development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and spiritual kosmos.
I say he has studied, meditated to no profit, whatever may-be his mere erudition,
who has not absorb'dthis simple consciousness and faith. It is not entirely
new—but it is for Democracy to elaborate it, and look to build upon and
expand from it, with uncompromising reliance. Above the doors of teaching the
inscription is to appear, Though little or nothing can be absolutely known,
perceiv'd, except from a point of view which is evanescent, yet we know at least one
permanency, that Time and Space, in the will of God, furnish successive chains,
completions of material births and begin-
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nings, solve all discrepancies, fears
and doubts, and eventually fulfil happiness—and that the prophecy of those
births, namely spiritual results, throws the true arch over all teaching, all
science. The local considerations of sin, disease, deformity, ignorance, death,
&c., and their measurement by the superficial mind, and ordinary legislation
and theology, are to be met by science, boldly accepting, promulging this faith, and
planting the seeds of superber laws—of the explication of the physical
universe through the spiritual—and clearing the way for a religion, sweet
and unimpugnable alike to little child or great savan.