which envisions “the little that is Good steadily hastening towards im-
mortality, / And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge
itself and become lost and dead.”^39
“Song of the Universal,” which the poet calls “a song that no poet yet
has chanted,” opens on a Universalist note:
In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.Within the soul of each human being, the poem implies, inheres the urge
to perfection, capable of sprouting even under the worst circumstances.
Once again Whitman opts for “the soul above all science,” maintaining
that in the course of evolution “the real to the ideal tends”—a statement
implying that our lives are governed by a tendency toward physical and
social betterment or that our mortal existence must, in time, be super-
seded by some form of spiritual existence. And in words that could have
been sanctioned by Hosea Ballou, the poet asserts that both the “right”
and “what we call evil” will ultimately evolve into a condition of univer-
sal goodness and joy—pointedly concluding his stanzas with the word
universal:
Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears,
Health to emerge and joy, joy universal.Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men
and states,
Electric, antiseptic, yet cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the good is universal.The terms “electric” and “antiseptic” in the above stanzas point to a uni-
versal ameliorative force forever operating to purify and improve the hu-
man race. In a similar vein, Democratic Vistas declares that human corrup-
tion is steadily being absorbed and neutralized by “Nature’s antiseptic
224 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”