spirit. The effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without selection. His single expressions are often unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these: "And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north." Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the people-multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truckdriver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." His poem Walt Whitman, frankly egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man—the same as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great tenderness and heartiness-"the good gray poet; " and during the civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the Washington hospitals---an experience which he has related in the Dresser and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra civilization—like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not many. His indebtedness to Emerson -who wrote an introduction to the Leaves of Grass-is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the dramatic elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists, but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the technique of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank verse, for example, in the Man-of- War-Bird: "Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.; and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters: "Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! ... Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, My Captain, written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show: war. "My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; But I, with mournful tread, Fallen, cold and dead." This is from Drum Taps, a volume of poems of the civil Whitman has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry: Democratic Vistas, Memoranda of the Civil War, and, more recently, Specimen Days. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in 1876. 1. William Cullen Bryant. Thanatopsis. Thanatopsis. To a Waterfowl. Green River. Hymn to the North Star. A Forest Hymn. "O Fairest of the Rural Maids." June. The Death of the Flowers. The Evening Wind. The BattleField. The Planting of the Apple-tree. The Flood of Years. 2. John Greenleaf Whittier. Cassandra Southwick. The New Wife and the Old. The Virginia Slave Mother. Randolph of Roanoke. Barclay of Ury. The Witch of Wenham. Skipper Ireson's Ride. Marguerite. Maud Muller. Telling the Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie. Ichabod. Laus Deo. Snow-Bound. 3. Edgar Allan Poe. Ulalume. To Helen. To One in Paradise. The Raven. The Bells. Israfel. The City in the Sea. Annabel Lee. The Sleeper. The Valley of Unrest. The Fall of the House of Usher. Ligeia. William Wilson. The Cask of Amontillado. The Assignation. The Masque of the Red Death. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. 4. N. P. Willis. Select Prose Writings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886. 5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Oldtown Folks. 6. W. G. Simms. The Partisan. The Yemassee. Taurus. SeraThe Temptation Euphorion. The Views Afoot. By 7. Bayard Taylor. A Bacchic Ode. Hylas. Kubleh. The Soldier and the Pard. Sicilian Wine. pion. The Metempsychosis of the Pine. of Hassan Ben Khaled. Bedouin Song. Quaker Widow. John Reid. Lars. ways of Europe. The Story of Kennett. The Echo Club. 8. Walt Whitman. My Captain. "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed." "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Pioneers, O Pioneers. The Mystic Trumpeter. A Woman at Auction. Sea-shore Memoirs. Passage to India. Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings for Home. 9. Poets of America. By E. C. Stedman. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. Boston: CHAPTER VII. LITERATURE SINCE 1861. A GENERATION has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the Northern side, Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-President Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. Draper's American Civil War, 1868-70; on the Southern side Alexander H. Stephens's Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America, and E. A. Pollard's Lost Cause. These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, there |