Have you read Walt Whitman? _There_ is a glorious human being—so magnificent, so all-embracing in his love, so turbulent, so large in his personality that to know him, to feed upon him, you must become submerged in his book, his soul,—"The Leaves of Grass." Of this volume containing his poems he himself said,
This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man.
You do indeed touch a man! A great spirit who saw in all things God; a Democrat who saw in all men the spark of the divine; a leader who raced out to the farthest reaches of the soul and beckons and begs you to follow; a lover who embraced all, the prostitute, the poet, the lowly, the exultant, Christ himself, in a spirit of human fellowship; a physical giant who gloried in his sex and makes you consider sacred the relationship of the sexes; a nurse who brought upon himself paralysis by caring for the wounded in the Civil War; a prophet who could no more believe that the spirit of an individual man could die than that it had never been born. Perhaps you think I write extravagantly—I do not—I but attempt to present what the personality of Walt Whitman has meant to me, and to many, many others. I but ask that you go to the "Leaves of Grass," and come in contact with that man to whom so many look and say—"A great part of myself is you, Walt Whitman! My life has been renewed since first I touched your hand."
Tolstoy! There is another one who believed in humanity and God,—there is another who has put a huge, rugged, loving soul within books. Probably no one has so influenced the humanitarianism of our day as did this bearded old warrior from Russia; but it was the deep human sympathy of the actual living Tolstoy that moved the world, not the arguments he deduced nor the warnings he gave. He was always a moralist,—even in his masterpiece "Anna Karenina" it is not the story he tells, but the human love which he reveals that has made the eternal monument. Afraid of nothing,—the Czar, convention, hatred, oppression,—he lived his life according to the dictates of his own conscience, the most punishing conscience that has ever been the attribute of a master soul. If you do not know him, read his short story "Master and Man." There you will find enunciated, in a manner as poignant, as powerful, as even that of the Sermon on the Mount, the doctrine of happiness found in living your life for others. Selfishness, pride, materialism, the sins that spoil the world, cannot stand in the way of the burning words of Tolstoy. Your conscience will receive a stiffening medicine, your sympathies for the sins and sufferings of your neighbors will deepen to bed rock, and your life will become proportionately more true, more happy, more Christian. Six years ago in the lowly hut near the Caucasus, when the mighty soul of Tolstoy left the body, the World missed a leader, a lover, a prophet—but his word still remains, and the doctrine as told by him of universal betterment through love and human sympathy will reach mankind whilst there are men left to read, and to communicate.