launches himself upon the new world. He will be the inaugurator of a new-founded literature, not " to exhibit technical, rhythmic, or grammatical dexterity," but a literature "underlying life, religion, consistent with science, handling the elements and forces with competent power, teaching and training men.” In any craft, he says, “he is greatest forever and ever who contributes the greatest original practical example." After our excursion into programme and theory, the practical example now engages us as we turn to estimate results.

Considered first of all in its merely formal aspect, "Leaves of Grass," whatever else it may be besides, is not to be wholly excluded from the category of poetry. Denying himself the aid of sharply marked metre and the sonority and graces of rhyme, Whitman bases his title to the poetic office upon two characteristics of his style: these are the imaginative power of

his phrasing and his rhythm. As a propagandist and a theorist, Whitman is interesting and significant, but not convincing or creative of beauty; as with Wordsworth, when he is most conscious and affirmative, he is least a poet. But by native temperament and by chance experience of life, he maintained that original and fresh relation to things which is the making of an artist; and he was gifted with an instinctive, curiously just perception of musical values which enabled him to achieve impassioned and quickening emotional expression.

Whitman has the authentic artist's innocence of the eye. He sees all things as though for the first time, and he sees them with delighted surprise. This deliberate freshness of vision, attended by wonder, makes possible a grasp of the salient and the essential. From this follows the graving epithet, cutting the image with lightning-revealed distinctness; from this, the evocative phrase, summoning forth the

very being of the thing,-a living spirit now, transcending its material embodiment, playing upon our spirit and quickening us to response and fusion. Whitman ranges all the way from the literal mention of hopelessly prosaic objects which not even his imagination is powerful enough to illumine, up to the ultimate sublimities of transfigured imagery and creative phrase. One is sufficiently familiar with his cataloguing method. This strain and fibre in his verse is usually the first charge to be brought against him in any indictment of his poetry. Undoubtedly for Whitman himself this pell-mell of names and things had a certain imaginative value, as representing the infinite diversity of the universe. But no less undoubtedly it has not the same value for the reader. Art is not the bald reproduction of actuality. Art interprets, and makes vital what was before inert; it translates material into mood. In his uninspired moments of which there

were many -Whitman gives us not the impression and spirit of chaos, its import for the emotions, but chaos itself, actual and unredeemed. Often, however, in these very catalogues, he lifts the single item out of itself, translating the object into sensation and kindling it with the glow of his own feeling.

The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp.

What before we may have passed a hundred times without notice is lighted up with a new interest, and we get a quick sting of pleasure. With him we thrill in

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,

The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor.

Or that fresh keen sight of his catches a transient group in a vivid flash, arrests it, and makes it permanent because so real. The vividness of the image carries it to our

own experience so that it becomes a vital part of us.

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers

and waist-straps,

The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the

alert,

The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd neck and the counting.

Examples might be multiplied indefinitely. These swift touches with living reality may or may not repay the reader as he pushes through the jostling crowd of common things. For my part, I do not tire of these little vignettes; in them Whitman gives me a new vision of the world. The commonplace becomes interesting after all; the daily round is richer than I had supposed. Glimpses and images such as these are the upland levels, the wide-stretching plateaus, of Whitman's verse. On the heights he is absolute. The exaltation of his thought and all-fusing intensity of his