And this is not eclecticism: it is universalism, a complete acceptance of the religious experience, whatever its form. For Walt Whitman feels the need of religion, and asserts that he comes to bring us a religion:
I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena …
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough …
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion …
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable to flame, the essential life of the earth,
Any more than such are to religion.[1]
But what is the essence of Whitman’s religion? In one of his songs he confesses the gods of his belief: the ideal man, death, the soul, time, space.[2] Yet his polytheism is only apparent: his mind is unitarian. All things are one: this unity may be called soul, it may be called Walt Whitman, but it may better be called God. God is all and is everywhere:
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
