Excerpt from The Wisdom of Walt Whitman: Selected and Edited, With Introduction Love, even in its physical expression, is filled with the deep religious instinct, for the soul is not more than the body and the body 18 not more than the soul; and Love, rising above the expression of passion becomes the ad hesive element binding comrades universal into a cohesive body-politic while the impulses toward reproduction must be refined and sanc tified into the purpose to produce sons and daughters fit for these States. The sublety of Whitman's thought is such that It 18 not always easy to classify excerpts. This passage relates to Democracy, but we find that in his ideal Democracy, Religion, an individual mystic communion with the divine pr1nc1ple, is a vital element, and the two ideas are so delicately interwoven that the extract would fit into place under either heading. The saving grace of these subtleties for the compiler is in the fact that if the reader finds under one topic a suggestion which leads his mind to another subject he will be equally likely to find in that place a reciprocal thought taking him back to the other. In Whitman's conception of the universeeverything centers upon the individual. The evolution of one's own personality is the key note to his whole philosophy, and this subject therefore stands well as the entrance porch to any collection of his utterances. His ideas Of Literature and Art and of the Conduct of Life are subjected always to the demands of Democracy and the modern spirit, and are expressed vigorously and with a facility Of phrase that is often finely epigrammatic. His highest thought and his most original contri bution to literature will perhaps be found in his attitude toward Death. Resignation to the inevitable, a serene agnostic calm, a lean ing trust upon the divine mercy - fall these have been sung by other poets, but none of these satisfies Whitman. He first approaches the terror of dissolution Wltl'l a complete con sciousness of continuance in a more perfect condition of belng In which personal identity survives the ravages of the earth beetles, and chants a welcome to the Dark Mother in whom he finds the loosener of the stud ure-knot called life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.