The book came winged with a double message: it was a defense and an explanation of Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, and it was the call for a new era in American literature. In both aspects it was notable, notable as Wordsworth's early prefaces were notable. It was both an effect and a cause. The same impulse that launched it launched also Thoreau and the nature school, Bret Harte and the Pike County balladists, Mark Twain and the vulgarians, Howells and realism, and all the great wave of literature of locality. Its effect and the effect of _Leaves of Grass_ that went with it has been a marked one. After these two books there could be no more dilettanteism in art, no more art for mere art's sake, no more imitation and subservience to foreign masters; the time had come for a literature that was genuine and compelling, one that was American both in message and in spirit.
1871 was the culminating year of Whitman's literary life. He was at the fullness of his powers. His final attack of paralysis was as yet a year away. For the exhibition of the American Institute he put the message of _Democratic Vistas_ into poetic form--"After All, not to Create Only"--a glorious invitation to the muses to migrate to America:
Placard "Remov'd" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
a perfect hexameter line it will be noted, as also this:
Ended, deceas'd through time, her voice by Castaly's fountain.
And the same year he put forth an enlarged and enriched _Leaves of Grass_, including in it the splendid "Passage to India," celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal, a poem that is larger than the mere geographic bounds of its subject, world-wide as they were, for it is a poem universe-wide, celebrating the triumphs of the human soul.
We too take ship, O soul, Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul), Caroling free, singing our song of God.
Passage to more than India! Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights? O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those? Disportest thou on waters such as those? Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas? Then have thy bent unleash'd.