Walt Whitman does not indeed face the Unknown with apprehensions and misgivings. If he does not appear to cherish Christian hopes and expectations, his Pantheism has not prevented him from maintaining a belief in another existence, and an existence not less adapted to and filled with activity and energy than the present one. Yet he does not speculate much upon the future. Rather does he seem to be chiefly interested in forecasting the ultimate destiny of Leaves of Grass , which he does not like to think will be relegated to the limbo of unused or unreadable books. This question is of course not one upon which those who like or who dislike Walt Whitman's writings can pass final judgment.
Posterity often does surprising things and adopts queer views.
As regards his contemporaries, they certainly have not discovered in him the music of the future, and the reasons which have determined the prevailing judgment upon him do not appear weak or capricious. Walt Whitman himself retains a consolatory assurance of his own position, and it is not worth while to attempt to disturb his faith. In the concluding pages of the present volume he gives some autobiographic memoranda which will be found interesting and quaintly illustrative of character. For it is unfortunately the fact that when Walt Whitman tries to be profound he commonly becomes unintelligible, seeming to lose his footing in a bag of verbiage. His passion for stringing words together in catalogue-form recalls old Burton at times, though of course Whitman has nothing of Burton's erudition.