and his hostility to the existing formalism injured his earlier poems by tinging them with something of iconoclastic extravagance. He was the deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet, and Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. Keats had the broadest mind, or at least his mind was open in more sides, and he was able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron, equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one, and the many littlenesses of the other, while Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste and feeling; and those of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he lived. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination less for his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with motives by the duties of life.

As every young person goes through all the world-old experiences, fancying them something peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with every new generation, whose youth always finds its representatives in its poets. Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary. Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found in vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it except when it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic expression than any modern English poet. And by poetic expression we do not mean merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than is commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or reapplies an

old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated, becomes his at last who utters it best. This power of language is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants of some word. As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the discoverer of an anæsthetic for the body and make him member of all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the small academy of the immortals. The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry; for, however often we may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious expression that reaction against the barrelorgan style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The lowest point was indicated when there was such an utter confounding of the common and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallowcandles could be made of it. We find Keats at first going to the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow; but we see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty; thought emancipated itself from expression without becoming in turn its tyrant; and music and meaning floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on the smooth element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.

[The Life of Keats, prefixed to The Poetical Works of John Keats, Boston, 1854.]

WALT WHITMAN

[Walt (Walter) Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, and died at Camden, N.J., March 25, 1892. His father was of English, his mother of Dutch descent, and on his mother's side there was also Quaker blood. His formal education did not go beyond that furnished by the public schools, but he read much, and had a rare gift for assimilating the essence of what he read. His youth was spent in varied pursuits. He was at different times a teacher, a compositor, and an editor. In 1847-48 he edited the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1849 he started on a long tour, largely performed on foot, to the chief cities of the country. He journeyed through Pennsylvania and Virginia, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans, and returned by way of St. Louis, Chicago, and the lake cities, finding means for his travels by work on various journals. In 1851-52 he owned and managed a Brooklyn paper. For some years he was a carpenter and builder. During the war he was a volunteer nurse in the Washington hospitals, supporting himself by writing for the newspapers. The nervous strain of his experiences as a nurse and an attack of hospital fever made severe inroads on his robust constitution, but he held a government clerkship from 1865 until 1874, when he was stricken with partial paralysis, from the effect of which he never wholly recovered. The remainder of his life he spent mainly in Camden, N.J., visiting New York frequently, and occasionally making longer journeys. No American writer has known the rank and file of his countrymen as Whitman did. In "Manhattan," the city he knew best and loved best, as well as in other cities and in the country, he "became thoroughly conversant," as his biographer attests, "with the shops, houses, sidewalks, ferries, factories, tavern gatherings, political meetings, carousings, etc. He knew the hospitals, poorhouses, prisons, and their inmates," and honest laborers of all kinds and descriptions, with people of greater education. And to this wide knowledge he added a sympathy equally penetrating and all-embracing.

Whitman's principal prose writings are: Democratic Vistas (1871), Memoranda during the War (1875), Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), November Boughs (1888).]

THE reputation of Walt Whitman rests upon the poetical portion of his writings; but while that part of his works remains in the public eye, as it long must on account of its singularity of form and its inspiration, the lesser part which appears in the garb of prose will also be of interest, as containing the history of the

man and the abstract ideas of the writer. In Specimen Days, Whitman describes his parentage and early surroundings, the sights and occupations that filled his youth, his wanderings, his activity during the Civil War as a visitor and comforter of wounded soldiers in the hospitals at Washington, and finally his rambles and meditations in the woods of New Jersey. In Democratic Vistas, he explains his theory of his own poetry and the relation of the literature of the past and of the future to American society. Taking the two books together, we are able to learn what was Whitman's inspiration and ambition, what he thought of his country, of himself, and of his function.

Much of this, indeed, might have been gathered from the poems by an attentive reader; yet it is an advantage to have it all set down by the author in an autobiographical fashion with eloquence, clearness, and evident sincerity. The conditions that made possible so remarkable a writer, his personal character, and his ideal of the society he meant to describe and to serve, are thus brought vividly before us. And these confessions are not only interesting to one who wishes to understand the author of the Leaves of Grass, but they are in themselves of considerable imaginative and historical value.

His parents were farmers in central Long Island, and his early years were spent in that district. The family seems to have been not too prosperous and somewhat nomadic; Whitman himself drifted through boyhood without much guidance. We find him now at school, now helping the laborers at the farms, now wandering along the beaches of Long Island, finally at Brooklyn, working in an apparently desultory way as a printer, and sometimes as a writer for a local newspaper. He must have read or heard something, during this early period, of the English classics; his style often betrays the deep effect made upon him by the grandiloquence of the Bible, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. But his chief interest, if we may trust his account, was already in his own sensations. The aspects of nature, the forms and habits of animals, the sights of cities, the movement and talk of common people, were his constant delight. His mind was flooded with these images, keenly felt and often vividly rendered with bold strokes of realism and imagination. Many poets have had this

faculty to seize the elementary aspects of things, but none has had it so exclusively; with Whitman the surface is absolutely all and the underlying structure is without interest and almost without existence. He had had no education, and his natural delight in imbibing sensations had not been trained to the uses of practical or theoretical intelligence. He basked in the sunshine of perception and wallowed in the stream of his own sensibility, as later at Camden in the shallows of his favorite brook. Even during the war, when he heard the "drum-taps" so clearly, he could only gaze at the picturesque and terrible aspects of the struggle, and linger among the wounded from day to day with a canine devotion; he could not be aroused either to clear thought or positive action. So also in his poems; a multiplicity of images pass before him and he yields himself to each in turn with absolute passivity. But the world has no inside: it is a phantasmagoria of continuous visions, vivid, impressive, but monotonous and hard to remember, like the waves of the sea or the decorations of some barbarous temple, sublime only by the infinite aggregation of parts. This abundance of detail without organization; this wealth of perception without intelligence, and of imagination without taste, makes the singularity of Whitman's genius. Full of sympathy and receptivity, with a wonderful gift of graphic characterization and an occasional rare grandeur of diction, he fills us with a sense of the individuality and the universality of what he describes — it is a drop in itself, yet a drop in the ocean. The absence of any principle of selection, or of a sustained style, enables him to render aspects of things and of emotions which would have eluded a trained writer. He is, therefore, interesting even where he is grotesque or perverse. He is important in that he has accomplished, by the sacrifice of almost every other good quality, something never so well done before. He has approached common life without bringing in his mind any higher standard by which to criticise it; he has seen it, not in contrast to an ideal, but as the expression of forces more indeterminate and elementary than itself; and the vulgar, in this cosmic setting, has appeared to him sublime.

There is clearly some analogy between a mass of images without structure, and the notion of an absolute democracy. Whit