this attack he recovered, but his health was broken, never to be fully restored. About this time, Whitman obtained a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. Shortly afterward, he was removed by the Secretary of the Department, in circumstances little creditable to that official, for having published an immoral book. Almost immediately, however, he secured a clerkship in the Attorney-General's office. This position he retained until 1873, when he was incapacitated by a stroke of paralysis. He removed to Camden, New Jersey, which he made his home during the remainder of his life. These years he gave to literary work, undisturbed by any important outward events, composing poems, writing prose, and bringing out successive editions of his works. He was able to spend much time out of doors, basking in the light, listening to Nature, and absorbing cosmic influences. His occupations and observations are recorded with great charm in

Specimen Days." In 1879 he made a journey as far west as the Rocky Mountains, and home by way of Canada. In Camden he gathered about him a little company of devoted friends. Ill and poor, and still the object of bitter attack and threatened legal prosecution, he was nevertheless cheered by the recognition his work was receiving in England and on the Continent. There was more suffering than gladness for him now, but his serenity remained unshaken. His whole life justified his poetry, and never more than in the closing years. He kept the faith to the end. At last the hour of quiet was vouchsafed, March 26, 1892, and Walt Whitman was born again.

Joy, shipmate, joy!

(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry,)
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmate, joy.

II

WHITMAN'S ART

Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill'd from poems pass away,

The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave

ashes,

Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature,

He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original practical example.

A

READER of poetry, trained in literary perception, seeking æsthetic experience, and finding satisfaction in the rhythmic outlines of beautiful forms and in the music of measure and rhyme, opens "Leaves of Grass" to encounter a shock. At first glance he is bewildered and perhaps repelled. These rough, common, everyday words, these bumps and knots, these ejaculations, these strange, involved sentences or nosentences, — this is not prose exactly, nor

does it seem to be poetry, as he is familiar with it. His eye falls on the line, "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." Not only is the poetry uncouth: this shaggy bard appears to be aware of his uncouthness and even to glory in it. Yet, perhaps, piqued by curiosity, the reader ventures a page or two, with open mind and attentive ear. Unaccountably, as it seems at first, the spell begins to lay hold upon him. Through these paragraphs undulates a subtle rhythm, like the rhythm of cosmic forces, the ebb and flow of the tide, the return of the seasons. These random phrases -are they not accidental?-fall with the eternal rightness of the fall of a stone; they strike with the emphasis and sudden finality of a lightning-bolt. The power of it is undeniable. In spite of himself, the reader surrenders to the magic of this new strange utterance; and he asks himself wonderingly, What is poetry, after all?

In terms of a broad definition, poetry is

the articulate expression of emotion through the medium of concrete symbols phrased in words; it is impassioned speech. The form, by which poetry is distinguished from prose, is not a primary differentia, but follows as a consequence upon the emotion within, which pulses outward to expression. Word over all, beautiful as the sky,

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin

-I draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Here there is neither rhyme nor definite metre. The emotion is intense and the thought exalted; bound up together, they embody themselves in a form, and they speak a language, which have the power to stir the reader and to rouse in him a mood consonant with the writer's own. Or again,