Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

WALT WHITMAN
close privacies of life ; that on this subject, as on all
others, he now and then lets fall a pregnant saying.
But we are not satisfied. We feel that he was not
the man for so difficult an enterprise. He loses our
sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting
too much of our attention in that of a Bull in a
China Shop. And where, by a little more art, we
might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often
Whitman alone who is solemn in the face of an
audience somewhat indecorously amused.
VI
Lastly, as most important, after all, to human
beings in our disputable state, what is that higher
prudence which was to be the aim and issue of these
deliberate productions ?
Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct
formula. If he could have adequately said his say
in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he would
not have put himself to the trouble of writing several
volumes. It was his programme to state as much
as he could of the world with all its contradictions,
and leave the upshot with God who planned it.
What he has made of the world and the world's
meanings is to be found at large in his poems. These
altogether give his answers to the problems of beUef
and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-
spirited, in some ways loose and contradictory. And
yet there are two passages from the preface to the
Leaves of Grass which do pretty well condense his
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