Recent English Poetry – 4 195consequent breaking down of its bounds. A self-exceeding of the
intellect and a growth of man into some first freedom and power
of an intuitive mentality supported by the liberated intelligence
is in its initial travail of new birth. These things have not all
arrived, but they are on the way and the first waves of the surge
have already broken over the dry beaches of the age of reason.
This considerable change was intellectually anticipated and
to some extent prepared in the last century itself by a strain, a
little thin in body, but high and continuous, of strenuous intel-
lectuality which strove to rise beyond the level of the ordinary
thought of the time to the full height and power of what the
intellect of the race could then think out or create in the light
of the inheritance of our ages. A small number of writers —
in the English language Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin are the best
known among these names, — build for us a bridge of transition
from the intellectual transcendentalism of the earlier nineteenth
century across a subsequent low-lying scientific, utilitarian, ex-
ternalised intellectualism, as if from bank to bank across morass
or flood, over to the age now beginning to come in towards us.
But in the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman was
the one prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw
and prepared the paths and had some sense of that to which they
are leading. He belongs to the largest mind of the nineteenth
century by the stress and energy of his intellectual seeking, by
his emphasis on man and life and Nature, by his idea of the
cosmic and universal, his broad spaces and surfaces, by his
democratic enthusiasm, by his eye fixed on the future, by his
intellectual reconciling vision at once of the greatness of the
individual and the community of mankind, by his nationalism
and internationalism, by his gospel of comradeship and frater-
nity in our common average manhood, by almost all in fact of
the immense mass of ideas which form the connecting tissue of
his work. But he brings into them an element which gives them
another potency and meaning and restores something which in
most of the literature of the time tended to be overcast and
sicklied over by an excessive intellectual tendency more leaned
to observe life than strong and swift to live it and which in the