The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. Whitman Walt

matter nor force capable of annihilation. Endless transformations, disappearances, new combinations, but diminution of the total amount never; missing in one place or shape to be found in another, disguised ever so long, ready always to re-emerge. “A particle of oxygen,” wrote Faraday, “is ever a particle of oxygen; nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and disappears as oxygen, if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral – if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities neither more nor less.” So then out of the universe is no door. Continuity again is one of Nature’s irrevocable words; everything the result and outcome of what went before; no gaps, no jumps; always a connecting principle which carries forward the great scheme of things as a related whole, which subtly links past and present, like and unlike. Nothing breaks with its past. “It is not,” says Helmholtz, “the definite mass of substance which now constitutes the body to which the continuance of the individual is attached. Just as the flame remains the same in appearance and continues to exist with the same form and structure although it draws every moment fresh combustible vapour and fresh oxygen from the air into the vortex of its ascending current; and just as the wave goes on in unaltered form and is yet being reconstructed every moment from fresh particles of water, so is it also in the living being. For the material of the body like that of flame is subject to continuous and comparatively rapid change – a change the more rapid the livelier the activity of the organs in question. Some constituents are renewed from day to day, some from month to month, and others only after years. That which continues to exist as a particular individual is, like the wave and the flame, only the form of motion which continually attracts fresh matter into its vortex and expels the old. The observer with a deaf ear recognizes the vibration of sound as long as it is visible and can be felt, bound up with other heavy matter. Are our senses in reference to life like the deaf ear in this respect?”

      “You are not thrown to the winds – you gather certainly and safely around yourself;

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      It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father – it is to identify you;

      It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided;

      Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form’d in you,

      You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

      “O Death! the voyage of Death!

      The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments for reasons;

      Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn’d or reduced to powder or buried.

      My real body doubtless left me for other spheres,

      My voided body, nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, farther offices, eternal uses of the earth.”

      Yes, they go their way, those dismissed atoms with all their energies and affinities unimpaired. But they are not all; the will, the affections, the intellect are just as real as those affinities and energies, and there is strict account of all; nothing slips through; there is no door out of the universe. But they are qualities of a personality, of a self, not of an atom but of what uses and dismisses those atoms. If the qualities are indestructible so must the self be. The little heap of ashes, the puff of gas, do you pretend that is all that was Shakespeare? The rest of him lives in his works, you say? But he lived and was just the same man after those works were produced. The world gained, but he lost nothing of himself, rather grew and strengthened in the production of them.

      Still farther, those faculties with which we seek for knowledge are only a part of us, there is something behind which wields them, something that those faculties cannot turn themselves in upon and comprehend; for the part cannot compass the whole. Yet there it is with the irrefragable proof of consciousness. Who should be the mouthpiece of this whole? Who but the poet, the man most fully “possessed of his own soul,” the man of the largest consciousness; fullest of love and sympathy which gather into his own life the experiences of others, fullest of imagination; that quality whereof Wordsworth says that it

      “… in truth

      Is but another name for absolute power,

      And clearest insight, amplitude of mind

      And reason in her most exalted mood.”

      Let Walt Whitman speak for us:

      “And I know I am solid and sound;

      To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow:

      All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

      “I know I am deathless;

      I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass;

      I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

      “I know I am august;

      I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood;

      I see that the elementary laws never apologize;

      (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

      “I exist as I am – that is enough;

      If no other in the world be aware I sit content;

      And if each one and all be aware, I sit content.

      “One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself;

      And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years,

      I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

      “My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite;

      I laugh at what you call dissolution;

      And I know the amplitude of time.”

      What lies through the portal of death is hidden from us; but the laws that govern that unknown land are not all hidden from us, for they govern here and now; they are immutable, eternal.

      “Of and in all these things

      I have dream’d that we are not to be changed so much, nor the law of us changed,

      I have dream’d that heroes and good doers shall be under the present and past law,

      And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the present and past law,

      For I have dream’d that the law they are under now is enough.”

      And the law not to be eluded is the law of consequences, the law of silent teaching. That is the meaning of disease, pain, remorse. Slow to learn are we; but success is assured with limitless Beneficence as our teacher, with limitless time as our opportunity. Already we begin —