the all, sees the all reflected in the self, and feels the self intimately mingled with the all. Addressing an unknown friend, he says:
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side.[1]
The enumeration goes on and on, in the endeavor to suggest effectively this sense of oneness with all things. He is conscious of himself as being the universal spirit, as being breath and air, as the God of a pantheistic world (if you will permit the paradox) might be conscious of himself:
Santa Spirita, breather, life,
Beyond the light, lighter than light,
Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell,
Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume,
Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan,
Ethereal, pervading all, (for without me what were all? what were God?)
Essence of forms, life of the real identities, permanent, positive, (namely the unseen,)
Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general soul.[2]
In this sense Walt Whitman may even be called a mystic. Yet he is very unlike other mystics, for he does not lose himself in God, but aspires, as it were, to be so universal as to include
