ever to reach out to generations of readers. Even “when he exists in the
past tense,” says Stephen Railton, “he’s very much alive to his readers.
This is Whitman’s characteristic de¤nition of immortality.”^44 According
to Stephen A. Black, Whitman conceives of an interlocking literary and
personal immortality. “[D]eath seems beautiful to Whitman,” Black de-
clares. “The most convincing assurance of immortality Whitman can
¤nd accompanies the idea that the poet’s soul can merge with the poems
and thus outlive his body.... At the same time death promises him re-
lief from various guilts about the perversities uncovered during poetic
journeys—and so he falls half in love with death’s easefulness.”^45
Despite Whitman’s characteristic dualism, he wisely avoided describ-
ing the mechanism by which the body is joined to, or integrated with, the
soul. But, unfortunately, as the coda of the 1856 version of “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry” attests, he yielded for a moment to an unfortunate im-
pulse to explain the linkage between the objective-material world and the
subjective-spiritual world. The result, as the following lines testify, is an
anomaly.
We realize the soul by you, you faithful solids and ®uids,
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality,
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions
and determinations of ourselves.Super¤cially, the lines illustrate the familiar principle that a spiritual ele-
ment inheres in all material things and that each object in the material
world is a cryptic indicator of something spiritual. However, a literal
reading of these lines reveals that Whitman was toying with the notion
that the mind—or, more precisely, the brain—is an alembic that distills
(and, by implication, combines) the sensory data derived from the mate-
rial world and the in®uxes of spirit. He phrases this conjectured process
of assimilation, oddly enough, in terms of the pseudoscience of phre-
nology. The words color, form, location, sublimity, ideality, and comparison
in the above lines, are all phrenological terms that designate purported
segments, or “faculties,” of the brain, each “faculty” said to be responsible
for processing speci¤c material or immaterial stimuli. Sublimity and ide-
ality were credited by phrenologists with absorbing and transforming in-
®uxes of the spirit and intimations of immortality from the raw data of
the material world into exalted thoughts, insights, and inspiration. By
124 / “The Progress of Souls”