ences to pictures, although he speaks with enthusiasm of several hours spent with a collection of Millet's paintings and drawings. Of all the arts, music made the most direct æsthetic appeal and reached him most intimately. In his own work, poems like "The Mystic Trumpeter," "That Music Always Round Me," and " Proud Music of the Storm," and many shorter passages in the "Leaves" are vibrant with a deep and exquisite musical feeling.

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess❜d them.

During the years in New York, Whitman had abundant opportunity to hear good music. "I heard," he says, "these years, well render'd, all the Italian and other operas in vogue." And he remarks elsewhere, “The experts and musicians of my present friends claim that the new Wagner and his pieces belong far more truly to me, and I to them. Very likely. But I was

fed and bred under the Italian dispensation, and absorb'd it, and doubtless show it."

The years up to 1850 were a time of preparation, indeterminate and more or less unconscious, it would seem, on Whitman's part. Then came a change. A sudden illumination flooded the dark gropings after something, and there was revealed to him the single meaning of the complex years. Capacities were there, latent, partly exercised, half-developed, but as yet to no end. Now all things flowed together, took shape, and became a Purpose. The bud, which had been slowly forming, burst into instant flower. The moment was sharp and definite in time. The result was cosmic in its scope and influence. As he lay, one "transparent summer morning," a new consciousness was born in him: it was the sudden, vivid, direct realization of God and of his own soul.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the

earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my

own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love.

This sense of the unity of the Whole, the oneness of all creation with its creator, of love as the vitalizing, all-fusing energy that throbs in every atom of the universe, is the germinal motive and life-essence of "Leaves of Grass."

From this time on, Whitman set himself deliberately to the making of his po

ems.

"After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc. . . . I found myself remaining possess'd, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and convic

tion. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else."

This desire was to set forth his entire personality against the background of "its immediate days and of current America," in a form and in terms new in literature. At the time when this desire was becoming articulate, Whitman was employed as a carpenter. His outward life, as it appeared to others, is thus described by his brother George.

"I was in Brooklyn in the early fifties, when Walt came back from New Orleans. We all lived together. No change seemed to come over him; he was the same man he had been, grown older and wiser. He made a living now wrote

a little, worked a little, loafed a little. . . . We did not know what he was writing. He did not seem more abstracted than usual. He would lie abed late, and after getting up would write a

few hours if he took the notion

perhaps would go off the rest of the day. We were all at work -all except Walt. But we knew he was printing the book."

In view of Whitman's out-of-door ways, his absorption in Nature and his passion for streets and actual human contacts, it is easy to divine the processes of gestation of his poems. Lines were jotted down as they came to him, anywhere, on ferries and omnibuses, at his work, or in the theatre. Then they were tested and tried by the sound of the wind or in sight of the sea. In 1855 he began the printing of his book, setting much of the type with his own hands; and in that year, the volume, containing twelve poems, appeared under the title "Leaves of Grass."

A thousand copies were printed. The book was placed on sale at several bookstores in New York and Brooklyn. Few, if any, copies were sold. In spite of this discouragement, and in the face of a storm