this repeated revision. The section of First Drafts and Rejected Lines and Passages' given in the Notes and Fragments does not show this transition, but is entirely in the style of Leaves of Grass itself. All that we know of the development of Whitman's peculiar style is what he tells us in one brief sentence: I had great trouble in leaving out the stock "poetical" touches, but succeeded at last.'

The first edition of Leaves of Grass had practically no sale. Some copies were sent out for review, which received little attention, and some were given away. Only one copy, so far as we know, won a real response, and that was the one sent to Emerson. His letter to Whitman must be quoted in full:

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging.

'I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.'

Whitman published this letter, together with his own long reply to it, in the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which appeared in 1856. On the back of this edition was printed, over Emerson's name, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.' All this was at least in somewhat doubtful taste, but Emerson was above resenting it or retracting anything he had said, though naturally in a private letter, acknowledging the gift of a book from its author, he perhaps expressed himself somewhat otherwise than he would have done in writing for public print. In 1856 he wrote to Carlyle, 'One book last summer came out in New York, a non-descript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American.' (See the whole letter in the Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, volume ii, page 283.) He visited Whitman in New York, as he had spoken of doing, and friendly relations were kept up between the two till the end of Emerson's life. In 1856 Thoreau also visited Whitman, and wrote of him soon after: 'That Walt Whitman . . is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least; simply sensual. . . . . On the whole it sounds to me very brave and American, after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are equal to it for preaching. We ought to rejoice greatly in him. . . . Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. Since I have

seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great fellow.'

The personal impression Whitman made upon all who ever saw him seems to have been such as to counteract any previous notions they may have had of his work as being either 'egotistic' or 'sensual.' Howells, not a judge prejudiced in his favor, met him in New York in 1860, and speaks of the spiritual purity which I felt in him, no less than the dignity.' Howells had previously conceived him as the apostle of the rough, the uncouth.' Now he found him to be the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.'

There are in Whitman's work passages which, though Thoreau's word 'sensual' is by no means the right one to describe them, are anything but fit reading for young ladies' seminaries. Such passages he has in common with nearly all the greatest writers. But naturally at their first appearance they aroused bitter opposition to him, and from time to time this opposition took serious practical form. When the third edition of Leaves of Grass was being printed at Boston in 1860, Emerson tried to persuade Whitman to omit these parts of his work. Whitman owns that each point of Emerson's statement was unanswerable,' but his own unmistakable conviction' that he must leave his work complete, as he understood completeness, was unshaken.

The 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass contained more than twice as many poems as the edition of 1855. The edition of 1860 was still further augmented, especially by the important collection of poems on men's friendship entitled Calamus. Neither of these editions, however, had much sale, and the firm which published the Boston edition failed at the beginning of the war

Whitman's younger brother, George, enlisted in the Union army and served throughout the war, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He was in most of the important battles in Virginia. In 1862 he was wounded at the first battle of Fredericksburg. The wound was thought to be serious (though it did not prove so), and Whitman at an hour's notice started for the army. He spent a considerable part of that winter with the Army of the Potomac, and began the attendance on wounded soldiers which he did not give up until the last hospitals at Washington were closed.

These were the central years of Whitman's life. He gave them almost wholly to his work for the soldiers, living as simply and cheaply as he could, and working in the hospitals almost daily till the end of the war. He assisted constantly in dressing the soldiers' wounds, but he did far more by ministering to their wants in many other ways, and most of all by the health and strength and courage of his own personality. A surgeon who throughout the war had charge of one of the largest army hospitals in Washington,' says Dr. Bucke, in his Life of Whitman, has told the present writer that (without personal acquaintance or any other than professional interest), he watched for many months Walt Whitman's ministerings to the sick and wounded, and was satisfied that he saved many lives.' There are few records, even in those years, of such simple and unselfish devotion as can be found in Whitman's Specimen Days, and in his unpremeditated letters, which have now been collected under the title The Wound-Dresser. At least one passage must be quoted from an eye-witness, Mr. John Swinton, telling of his hospital visits: 'I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Peninsula after a battle there. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, in the Washington hospitals, or wending his way there with basket or haversack on his arm, and the strength of beneficence suffusing his face. His devotion surpassed the devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness.

'Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds through a hospital, filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroism he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be lit by the presence of the Son of Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer, for another he wrote a letter home, to others he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, a sheet of paper or a postage stamp, all of which and many other things were in his capacious haversack. From another he would receive a dying message for mother, wife, or sweetheart; for another he would promise to go on an errand; to another, some special friend, very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and as he took his way towards the door, you could hear the voice of many a stricken hero calling, "Walt, Walt, Walt, come again! come again!"'

Drum Taps, Whitman's poems of the war, was published in 1865, and the Sequel to Drum Taps, containing his memorial poems on Lincoln, and a few more war poems, later in the year. It is surprising that these attracted so little attention as they did. Yet we must remember that it has always taken at least a generation for the general public to accept any original form of rhythmic expression, especially a form so different from accepted standards, and apparently so uncouth, as Whitman's. Of the substance of the poems, their vividness and truth, it is unnecessary to speak here. But it may be noted in passing, that, while there is more of the war in his work than in that of any other poet, there is nowhere any touch of bitterness or even of hostility.

Toward the end of the war Whitman obtained a position as clerk in the Department of the Interior. Not long afterward the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, came across Whitman's copy of Leaves of Grass (the 1860 edition) which he was revising for republication, and at once discharged Whitman as the author of an indecent book.' Whitman soon obtained an equally good position in the office of the Attorney-General, but the incident called out a famous defence of Whitman and arraignment of Harlan, in W. D. O'Connor's pamphlet The Good Gray Poet. This defence and arraignment are so exaggerated in tone that they have probably done Whitman's reputation more harm than good, and have made people feel that anything written by a disciple of his must be taken with very large allowances. Yet the pamphlet is admirable at least for its intense loyalty, and for its title, which was a creation of genius. Whitman has been called ever since, and deservedly, 'The Good Gray Poet.' '

The new and revised edition (the fourth) of Leaves of Grass, with Drum Taps added, was published in 1867. In 1871 was published the fifth edition, with Passage to India' and other important additions. / In 1872 Whitman was asked to give the Commencement poem at Dartmouth College, and he delivered 'As a strong bird on pinions free' (now Thou mother with thy equal brood'). In 'Passage to India and in the later poems that group themselves with it, we have Whitman's work under a somewhat new aspect. From the beginning he had said, 'I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,' and had insisted always on the unity of the two and on their equal claims. But both by temperament and by fixed intention he had expressed primarily the material side of things and of man (as he said, the side most neglected by other poets), glorying in the triumphs of modern industrialism and in the joys of physical health. 'Now (see the passages quoted in notes on pages 546 and 590, and the whole of his own note on Passage to India' in the Complete Prose Works, pages 272-274, as well as the poem itself and those that follow), he insists most on the other aspect of the dual unity, on the spirit, that 'laughs at what you call dissolution,' and knows it has the best of time and space./The changes which he made in the brief poem Assurances' (page 553) from one edition to another, until it found its final form as given in the 1871 edition with 'Passage to India,' are typical of this development.

Whitman was one of the healthiest of men. Those who have described his work in the hospitals say that health and strength seemed to radiate from his presence. All his life he had lived a great deal in the open air, and in the hospital years he depended on his long walks about Washington as his chief delight and relief. But by 1864 his health began to be broken down. He had the first illness of his life, called at first 'hospital malaria,' in the hot summer of that year. Dr. Platt, in his life of Whitman, says also that through a scratch in his hand he was infected with septic poisoning from a wound he was helping to dress. This seemed to have only a temporary effect, but he was never entirely well afterward. In January, 1873, he had a paralytic stroke, which for a while disabled his left side completely. After a time he recovered somewhat, but could never move freely. For the first two years he suffered severely, and he was an invalid for the nineteen years that followed. His work at Washington was of course ended, and he had no source of income but his books, which hardly brought him anything.

During these years he lived at Camden, N. J., the home of George Whitman. Almost in poverty, until 1881, when the sale of his works began to bring him a small income, which enabled him to live with some slight degree of comfort in a home of his own, —

and in constant weakness and much of the time helplessness, he underwent a test such as few men have been subjected to, and one which was particularly severe for him, the lover of all physical joys and especially of free movement in the open air. He met this test with complete triumph. All who saw him at Camden and his home became to some degree a goal of pilgrimage, especially in the last ten years of his life - bear witness to the sweetness and strength of the character that revealed itself in him.

The so-called 'Centennial Edition' of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1876, with a second volume, composed partly of prose and partly of verse. By 1879 Whitman had partially recovered from his paralysis, and was able to take a journey through the Western States in that year, and in the following year to Canada. In 1881 the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass was published by James R. Osgood & Co. of Boston, but six months after its publication, when some two thousand copies had been sold, the firm was threatened with prosecution by the Massachusetts District Attorney, and declined to continue the sale of the book. It was immediately after published at Philadelphia. In 1888 was added the collection called November Boughs, in 1891 were published Good-bye My Fancy and the tenth edition of Leaves of Grass, including these last two additions. Whitman's health had been steadily declining again since 1885; he suffered a second shock of paralysis in 1888, but lived on, still cheerful and mentally active, and happy in a few devoted friends, until 1892, when he died, March 26. The small collection, Old Age Echoes, was added to his Leaves of Grass in the 1897 edition, Calamus (letters to his friend Peter Doyle) was published in 1897, The Wound Dresser in 1898, An American Primer and the Diary in Canada in 1904.

The question whether Walt Whitman's work is properly to be called poetry at all or not still exists only in a few academic circles. It has always been largely a question of academic definitions. And while we must have some definiteness of conception, in order that our ideas may not become entirely vague and our words meaningless, it would be well in this case to imitate Whitman's own modesty when he says: 'Let me not dare, here or anywhere, for my own purposes, or any purposes, to attempt the definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, in my opinion no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry.' It may be added that one of the chief functions of any strongly original poet — or thinker is to compel us to enlarge our definitions.

But even without departing greatly from the traditional conceptions of poetry, and certainly without abandoning the idea that material for poetry, however noble or beautiful, does not truly become poetry until it has been put into rhythmic form, we are now beginning frankly to accept Whitman's work as poetry. We no longer need the excellent authority of John Addington Symonds, a critic competent above most others and especially devoted to beauty of form in verse, to tell us that Whitman's verse is wonderfully rhythmical, and that his rhythms are truly and often delicately fitted to what he has to express. It is only needful really to read Whitman, a thing which is often at first difficult to do and which people in general have not even yet learned to do to read him in the mass- and above all to read him aloud, which is the final test of poetry in order to feel the strength and fitness of his rhythms, and to realize that they are not the rhythms of prose, nor of that bastard form called poetic prose, but are distinctly metrical rhythms, that is, the rhythms of verse. For the most part, they hold among verserhythms somewhat the same place as the recitative and the chant (names which he often gives to his poems) hold in music. He has also, when he chooses, the lyric note. The distinction between his recitative and his lyric, when he uses them together, as in 'Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,' or When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,' is just the same and just as clearly marked as that between regular lyrics and regular blank

verse.

It has taken people so long, however, to settle for themselves, consciously or uncon sciously, this preliminary question of whether Whitman's work was poetry at all or not, that they have only just begun to appreciate his power and to give him his true rank.

Professor Trent, in his recent History of American Literature (1903), calls him 'too large a man and poet for adequate comprehension at present.' Moreover, Americans have been somewhat alienated from Whitman by the attitude of the best foreign critics, who have found in him the one and only poet truly characteristic of America. Not really having taken the trouble to know Whitman, but having conceived of him and his work as something rough, rowdyish, uncultured and altogether materialistic and sensual, Americans were naturally offended that he, rather than men like Longfellow, Lowell, and Emerson, should be taken as typical of America. We felt that all the chief American poets (except Poe, the only one whose work could have been written elsewhere than in America) were typical; and that the breadth of culture in such men as Longfellow and Lowell made them only the more completely typical. We naturally sought in the typical American poet an expression of our whole life and character, including (as Whitman himself has said somewhere) our inheritance of all the best from past ages and foreign lands; while the foreign critic, as naturally, sought in him the expression of only that part of our life which is entirely new and strange and if uncouth and rude, so much the better. We have now come to know Whitman more truly; to know that he was anything but the rowdy and materialist of our first conceptions; to know that while he did not lack culture in the narrower sense (having read and thoroughly digested Emerson, having understood Carlyle and in his own thought refuted and gone beyond him, having won some genuine knowledge of Fichte's thought and Hegel's, if not directly of Plato's, and having nourished himself on the few greatest writers, Shakspere, the Bible, and Homer - even though in translation, some genuine knowledge of which is better than our usual pretence at knowledge of the original) he also had that broader and better first-hand culture which comes from true human relations with many living men and women, forming out of them a character which stood some of the hardest tests of life. We have also become more ready to admit that those material aspects of our life which primarily, though by no means exclusively, he tried to express, are in their crudeness and power truly characteristic of America. And now, knowing him better, we see that he has expressed not only some material aspects, but also some essential ideals of America, as no other poet has: among them, our sense of freedom and independence (his work is the logical outcome of Emerson's address on The American Scholar'), our conception of real democratic equality, our intense individualism yet sense of union one with another in a great whole.

SIDNEY LANIER

SIDNEY LANIER was born at Macon, Ga., February 3, 1842. He came of a family of musicians, the earliest known ancestor having been attached to the court of Queen Elizabeth, and his son and grandson having been directors of music under Charles I and Charles II. The grandson was one of the incorporators and the first Marshal of the Society of Musicians under Charles II, and there were four others of the name of Lanier among the incorporators. Thomas Lanier came to America in 1716, and settled in Virginia. Lanier's father was a lawyer, living at Macon, Ga., and his mother was a Virginian of Scotch descent, of a family distinguished in politics and also skilled in music.

Sidney Lanier had from his childhood a strong ambition, and we may even say genius, for music. As a boy he seemed able to learn any instrument without instruction, and could play the flute, violin, organ, piano, and guitar before he could fairly read. His greatest passion was for the violin, but his father persuaded him to abandon it. His sensitive nature was hardly able to bear the exaltation produced in him by its notes. In deference to his father's wishes, he devoted himself chiefly to the flute.

When he was fourteen years old, he entered Oglethorpe College (or University,' as it called itself), in the sophomore class. After losing a year by outside work, he graduated at the age of eighteen, sharing the highest honors for scholarship with one of his classmates, and was immediately appointed tutor in the college. This was in 1860. In 1861 he gave up his position to volunteer as a private in the Confederate army. He was in the battles of