he comes even to the Lucifer-like conception of believing that he includes God.
But Walt Whitman is no man of a single aspect. He is a Janus of many faces, gathering in himself, like humanity, all possible characters and all possible sentiments. The Leaves of Grass, indeed, are not without instances of humility:
What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over.[1]
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present,
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.[2]
Extending his own humility to all mankind, he asks:
Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they?[3]
There is in Whitman something of a Prometheus and something of a Job; and if in some respects he may be called a precursor of Nietzsche, he may with equal propriety be classed on other grounds as a precursor of Dostoevsky and of Tolstoi. He never knew, probably, the “religion of human suffering,” but his great soul always felt a profound sympathy for the hum-
