PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE
331
I wish I could have had more talk with Whitman, I wish I had been older or more experienced, that I might have got nearer to him—or so I felt in those old days. I have now an idea that his silence was more effective than his speech, that if he had said more to any of his devoted following he might have been less of a prophet. But his tranquil presence was in itself sufficient to open a new outlook, and it reconciled me to the scheme of the universe for good or for ill. His personality impressed me far more than his poems. It seemed to me to explain them, to interpret them, as nothing else could—his few words of greeting worth pages of the critic's eloquent analysis.
