THE LIVING WHITMAN
399
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes.
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the grey smoke lucid and
bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun,
burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of
the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a win.d–
dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and
shadows,
And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of lite and the workshops, and the workmen home-
ward returning.
Dante, touched by the modernism of his friends, the Cavalcantis, his face
set toward the Renaissance, takes a long, tender look backward over the
pastoral centuries, the pastoral "dream"; the
"squilla"
echoes mournfully
in the ear of the new pilgrim. Whitman, so much more abstract than
Dante, is the last great poet of an essentially rural America, an America
of small manufacturers, the last to feel tenderly toward "stacks of chim–
neys." Two extremely different ways of seeing the world, but a common
cadence, an equal tenderness and magnificence of feeling.
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