is stormed by an artisan of the streets and country-side, who makes himself at home upon the ruins and calmly builds himself a shelter there. Consequent upon this shift in emphasis, his manner of address is necessarily different, in that it is the speech and terminology of common men and things. A workman could exchange his comfortable natural blouse for the rigid coat of evening wear more gracefully than such a purpose could clothe itself in the court costume of polite letters. New motive, new material, new form, — this is the task that Whitman deliberately set himself to achieve in poetry.

-

Original and unique as the book is, it is not to be supposed that "Leaves of Grass" is an accident, or that Whitman cut loose from the past altogether. His first word to his new public- the opening sentence of the Preface of the first edition of his poems-reads: "America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its

forms." A period of seven or eight years was the time of gestation of the book, following upon a long apprenticeship to the established craft of letters. His literary training, desultory as it was and quite at his own will and pleasure, reverted to sources and models of supreme excellence. He recognized the service of older literatures to their age and people, and he freely admitted his own obligation to them. “If I had not stood," he says, "before those poems with uncover'd head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written 'Leaves of Grass.'" But though the “ But though the " temper and inculcation of the old works" helped to shape him, their chief profit to him was to furnish a basis of comparison and contrast with reference to his own purpose and environment, and to supply less a model for emulation than a point of departure into the new. As America is a child and heir of the past, but independent now in its

own right, and a new being, so Whitman's poetry is made possible by elder achievement, an outgrowth from it by transmission, but it is none the less in its own time self-begotten and self-sustained. The old world had the poems of "myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs"; the new world needs the poems of "realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality."

Another land and time, another art. "Grateful and reverent legatee of the past," the poet of America to-day is the native-born child of the new world. Acknowledging its debt to precedent songs, "Leaves of Grass" presupposes something different. The protagonist advances to the centre of the stage, a new figure. The scene too is changed, and with it, all its accessories. It is no longer a question of myth, legend, or romance, or "choice plots of love or war"; of heroes, great personages, or fine-drawn sensibilities.

The theme of the new song is your average man, going practically about his work, enjoying honestly his hours off, and always in direct actual contact with things. The theatre of his deeds is the workshop or the fields; his glory and illustriousness is to be himself; his recompense is to know reality. As Whitman surveys the occupations and opportunities of America, set off against the constricted environment of old-world poets, it seems to him "as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were never possible before." This poetry can draw its inspiration and supply all its needed symbols from the lives of com

mon men.

Common life, if it is to find voice at all, must come to expression in its own terms. Fitly to celebrate the average man, we must speak his racy idiom; to glorify things still in the making, we need the vernacular, — language that is still fluid and plastic in the

mouths of men. There shall be no rigid forms, no polished reflecting surfaces; all shall be rough and fresh and smelling of the earth, the fragrance of new-cut timber, the acrid tang of unset mortar; it must have movement to tally the rush and hubbub of the streets. With aggressive deliberateness and a fierce joy, Whitman denies himself all "stock ornaments." He will not give us a" mere tale, a rhyme, a prettiness"; he will make a poem of materials and show how they furnish their parts toward the soul. The true art, said Millet, with whom Whitman had so much in common, is “to make the trivial serve for the expression of the sublime." Often with Whitman the trivial refused to unfold into the sublime, and became ridiculous. But no less often his performance exceeded himself, and his flight outstripped his aim.

With this preliminary clearing of the ground, Whitman moved to the attack. He approached his work, equipped with a pro