One has only to compare "O
Captain! my Captain!" with "Hushed be the Camps To-day" to perceive this
curious paradox. They are both of them memories of his beloved Lincoln,
whom he had many times seen, with that peculiarly close and transatlantic
curiosity of his, riding at a jog-trot, on a good-sized, easy-going grey
horse, with his escort of yellow-striped cavalry behind him, through the
streets of Washington--dressed in black, somewhat rusty and dusty, with a
black, stiff hat, almost as ordinary in attire as the commonest man. That
heroic face, too, he had pierced; and caught from it the deep, subtle,
indirect expression, that only the long-gone master-painters of the Old
World could have seized and immortalized. And in yet another memory of
this great American Whitman attains to his best and highest, "When Lilacs
Last in the Doorway Bloom'd." It is one of the most beautiful of poems,
of the purest intuition, of a consummate, if unconscious, artistry. Whose
voice is it that rings and echoes, now low and tender, now solemn and
desolate, now clear, full, victorious, out of its cloistral
solitude--that of the mourner himself, of all-heedfull, heedless Nature,
of the immortal soul of man, or just a bird, the shy and hidden, sweet,
small hermit thrush? The last division of his life's work--his fond Epic,
his cosmic "inventory"--as Whitman planned it, was to be devoted to the
chaunting of songs of death and immortality.
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