celebrating the spiritual life. Using a photographic ¤gure of speech, he
expresses a desire to “shift the slides, and exhibit the problem and para-
dox of the same ardent and fully appointed Personality [i.e., the Whit-
man persona] entering the sphere of resistless gravitation of Spiritual
Law, and with cheerful face estimating Death, not at all as the cessation,
but somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the greatest
part of existence, and something that Life is as much for, as it is for itself.”
Apparently sensing that his days may be coming to a close and fearful
that he would never publish another edition, he added, “I end my books
with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on Death, Immortality, and
a free entrance into the Spiritual World.” And in an extended note ap-
pended to the preface, he adds that having formerly celebrated the vi-
brant physical world, his work “still remains to be completed by suffusing
through the whole and several, the other pervading invisible fact, so large
a part (is it not the largest part?) of life here.” Still envisioning America
as the center from which democratic and spiritual values will “radiate”
around the world, he adds that he believes “it is no less than this idea of
Immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter into, and vivify, and give
crowning religious stamps to Democracy in the New World.” He contin-
ues to subordinate science to what he calls “a higher fact, the Eternal Soul
of Man (of all Else too), the Spiritual, the Religious—which is to be the
highest of¤ce of Scientism, in my opinion, and of future Poetry also, to
free from fables, crudities, and superstitions, and launch forth in renewed
Faith and Scope a hundred fold.” But despite its tone of passionate ad-
vocacy, the 1876 preface is less than persuasive, since it perpetuates the
older Whitman’s tendency to explain abstractions in terms of other ab-
stractions.^43
Not surprisingly, several minor poems ¤rst published in the 1876 edi-
tion stress the perseverance of the soul and dramatize the persona’s readi-
ness for what he imagines to be his impending demise. Many of these
verses celebrate his passage to realms beyond the known world, where he
expects to survive with his identity unimpaired. The volume’s dedicatory
poem equates the persona’s faith in immortality with his faith in the fu-
ture of Leaves of Grass, fantasizing that even “after death” he may “invis-
ibly return” and still be chanting his songs to “some group of mates...
in other spheres.” In the poem “After an Interval” the poet recalls gazing
into the starry heavens one midnight in November 1875, inspired by the
228 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”