tion that the employer is inferior to the employed, that the man of training, the civilizee, is less manly than the rough, the pioneer. He suspects those who, by chance or ability, rise above the crowd. What attention he does pay them is felt to be in the nature of patronage, and insufferable. Other things being equal, a scholar is as good as an ignoramus, a rich man as a poor man, a civilizee as a boor. Great champions of democracy-poets like Byron, Shelley, Landor, Swinburne, Hugo-often have come from the ranks of long descent. It would be easy to cite verses from Whitman that apparently refute this statement of his feeling, but the spirit of his whole work confirms it. Meanwhile, though various editions of his poems have found a sale, he is little read by our common people, who know him so well, and of whose democracy he is the self-avowed herald. In numberless homes of working-men-and all Americans are workers-the books of other poets are treasured. Some mental grip and culture are required, of course, to get hold of the poetry of the future. But Whittier, in this land, is a truer type of the people's poet,the word "people" here meaning a vast body of freemen, having a common-school education, homes, an honest living, and a general comprehension far above that of the masses in Europe. These folk have an instinct that Whittier, for example, has seized his day with as much alertness and selfdevotion as this other bard of Quaker lineage, and has sung songs "fit for the New World" as he found it. Whitman is more truly the voice and product of the culture of which he bids us beware. At least, he utters the cry of culture for escape from over-culture, from the weariness, the finical precision, of its own satiety. His warmest admirers are of several classes: those who have carried the art of verse to super-refined limits, and seeing nothing farther in that direction, break up the mold for a change; those radical enthusiasts who, like myself, are interested in whatever hopes to bring us more speedily to the golden year; lastly, those who, radically inclined, do not think closely, and make no distinction between his strength and weakness. Thus he is, in a sense, the poet of the over-refined and the doctrinaires. Such men, too, as Thoreau and Burroughs have a welcome that scarcely would have been given them in an earlier time. From the discord and artifice of our social life we go with them to the woods, learn to name the birds, note the beauty

of form and flower, and love these healthy comrades who know each spring that bubbles beneath the lichened crag and trailing hemlock. Theocritus learns his notes upon the mountain, but sings in courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. Whitman, through propagandists who care for his teachings from metaphysical and personal causes, and compose their own ideals of the man, may yet reach the people, in spite of the fact that lasting works usually have pleased all classes in their own time.

Reflecting upon his metrical theory, we also find narrowness instead of breadth. I have shown that the bent of a liberal artist may lead him to adopt a special form, but not to reject all others; he will see the uses of each, demanding only that it shall be good in its kind. Swinburne, with his cordial liking for Whitman, is too acute to overlook his formalism. Some of his eulogists, those whom I greatly respect, fail in their special analysis. One of them rightly says that Shakspere's sonnets are artificial, and' that three lines which he selects from "Measure for Measure" are of a higher grade of verse. But these are the reverse of " unmeasured lines, they are in Shakspere's free and artistic, yet most measured, vein. Here comes in the distinction between art and artifice; the blank-verse is conceived in the broad spirit of the former, the finish and pedantry of the sonnet make it an artificial form. A master enjoys the task of making its artifice artistic, but does not employ it exclusively. Whitman's irregular, manneristic chant is at the other extreme of artificiality, and equally monotonous. A poet can use it with feeling and majesty; but to use it invariably, to laud it as the one mode of future expression, to decry all others, is formalism of a pronounced kind. I have intimated that Whitman has carefully studied and improved it. Even Mr. Burroughs does him injustice in admitting that he is not a poet and artist in the current acceptation of those terms, and another writer simply is just in declaring that when he undertakes to give us poetry he can do it. True, the long prose sentences thrown within his ruder pieces resemble nothing so much as the comic recitativos in the buffo-songs of the concertcellars. This is not art, nor wisdom, but sensationalism. There is narrowness in his failure to recast and modify these and other depressing portions of various poems, and it is sheer Philistinism for one to coddle all the weaknesses of his experimental period, because they have been a product of himself.

One effect of the constant reading of his poetry is that, like the use of certain refections, it mars our taste for the proper enjoyment of other kinds. Not, of course, because it is wholly superior, since the subtlest landscape by Corot or Rousseau might be utterly put to nought by a melodramatic neighbor, full of positive color and extravagance. Nor is it always, either, to our bard's advantage that he should be read with other poets. Consider Wordsworth's exquisite lyric upon the education which Nature gives the child whom to herself she takes, and of whom she declares:

"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

It happens that Whitman has a poem on the same theme, describing the process of growth by sympathy and absorption, which thus begins and ends:

"There was a child went forth every day; And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became ;

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt-marsh and shore-mud; These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.'

Plainly there are some comparative advantages in Wordsworth's treatment of this idea.

It would be just as easy to reverse this showing by quoting other passages from each poet: the purpose of my digression is to declare that by means of comparative criticism any poet may be judged unfairly, and without regard to his general claims.

So far as Mr. Whitman's formalism is natural to him, no matter how eccentric, we must bear with it; whenever it partakes of affectation, it is not to be desired. The charge of attitudinizing, so often brought against his writings and personal career, may be the result of a popular impression that the border-line is indistinct between his selfassertion as a type of Man, and the ordinary self-esteem and self-advancement displayed by men of common mold. Pretensions have this advantage, that they challenge analysis, and make a vast noise even as we are forced to examine them. In the early preface to the "Leaves" there is a passage modeled, in my opinion, upon the style

of Emerson, concerning simplicity,-with which I heartily agree, having constantly insisted upon the test of simplicity in my discussion of the English poets. Yet this quality is the last to be discerned in many portions of the "Leaves of Grass." In its stead we often find boldness, and the "pride that apes humility,"-until the reader is tempted to quote from the " Poet of Feudalism" those words of Cornwall upon the roughness which brought good Kent to the stocks. Our bard's self-assertion, when the expression of his real manhood, is bracing, is an element of poetic strength. When it even seems to be "posing," it is a weakness, or a shrewdness, and 'tis a weakness in a poet to be unduly shrewd. Of course a distinction must be carefully made between the fine extravagance of genius, the joy in its own conceptions, and self-conscious vanity or affectation,-between, also, occasional weaknesses of the great, of men like Browning, and like the greatest of living masters, Hugo, and the afflatus of small men, who only thus far succeed in copying them. And it would be unjust to reckon Whitman among the latter class.

Doubtless his intolerant strictures upon the poets of his own land and time have made them hesitate to venture upon the first advances in brotherhood, or to intrude on him with their recognition of his birthright. As late as his latest edition, his opinion of their uselessness has been expressed in withering terms. It may be that this is merely consistent, an absolute corollary of his new propositions. There is no consistency, however, in a complaint of the silence in which they have submitted to his judgments. They listen to epithets which Heine spared Platen and his clique, and surely Heine would have disdained to permit a cry to go up in his behalf concerning a want of recognition and encouragement from the luckless victims of his irony. There is ground enough for his scorn of the time-serving, unsubstantial quality of much of our literature. But I should not be writing this series of papers, did I not well know that there are other poets than himself who hear the roll of the ages, who look before and after, above and below. The culture which he deprecates may have done them an ill turn in lessening their worldly tact. I am aware that Mr. Whitman's poems are the drama of his own life and passions. His subjectivity is so great that he not only absorbs all others into himself, but insists upon being absorbed by whomsoever he ad

dresses. In his conception of the world's equality, the singer himself appears as the one Messianic personage, the answerer and sustainer, the universal solvent,-in all these respects holding even "Him that was crucified" to be not one whit his superior. It is his kiss, his consolation, that all must receive,-whoever you are, these are given especially to you. But men are egotists, and not all tolerant of one man's selfhood; they do not always deem the affinities elective. Whitman's personality is too strong and individual to be universal, and even to him it is not given to be all things to all

men.

VI.

BUT there is that in venerableness which compels veneration, and it is an instinct of human nature to seek the blessing and revere the wisdom of the poet or peasant transfigured by hoary hairs :

"Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!

A year or more ago I was one of a small but sympathetic audience gathered in New York to hear Mr. Whitman, at the cordial request of many authors, journalists and artists, deliver a lecture upon Abraham Lincoln. As he entered, haltingly, and took the seat placed for him, his appearance satisfied the eye. His manly figure, clothed in a drab suit that loosely and well became him, his head crowned with flowing silvery hair, his bearded, ruddy and wholesome face, upon which sat a look of friendliness, the wise benignity that comes with ripened years, all these gave him the aspect of a poet and sage. His reminiscences of the martyr President were slight, but he had read the hero's heart, had sung his dirge, and no theme could have been dearer to him or more fitly chosen. The lecture was written in panoramic, somewhat disjointed, prose, but its brokenness was the counterpart of his vocal manner, with its frequent pauses, interphrases, illustrations. His delivery was persuasive, natural, by turns tender and strong, and he held us with him from the outset. Something of Lincoln himself seemed to pass into this man who had loved and studied him. A patriot of the honest school spoke to us, yet with a new voicea man who took the future into his patriotism, and the world no less than his own land.

I wished that the youths of America

could hear him, and that he might go through the land reading, as he did that night, from town to town. I saw that he was, by nature, a rhapsodist, like them of old, and should be, more than other poets, a reciter of the verse that so aptly reflects himself. He had the round forehead and head which often mark the orator, rather than the logician. He surely feels with Ben Jonson, as to a language, that "the writing of it is but an accident," and this is a good thing to feel and know. His view of the dramatic value of Lincoln's death to the future artist and poet was significant. It was the culminating act of the civil war, he said: "Ring down the curtain, with its muses of History and Tragedy on either side." Elsewhere his claim to be an American of the Americans was strengthened by a peculiarly national mistake, that of confounding quantity with quality, of setting mere size and vastness above dramatic essence. When the brief discourse was ended, he was induced to read the shorter dirge, "O Captain! My Captain!"* It is, of his poems, among those nearest to a wonted lyrical form, as if the genuine sorrow of his theme had given him new pinions. He read it simply and well, and as I listened to its strange, pathetic melodies, my eyes filled with tears, and I felt that here, indeed, was a minstrel of whom it would be said, if he could reach the ears of the multitude and stand in their presence, that not only the cultured, but "the common people heard him gladly."

Although no order of talent or temperament, in this age, can wholly defy classification, there nevertheless is a limbo of poets, artists, thinkers, men of genius, some of

SOME years ago, when New York was more of an old-fashioned city than now, there stood on Broadway, between Walker and Canal streets, a hall known as the Minerva Rooms. It was a cozy old place, used principally for those mild forms of amusement known as "family entertainments," and occasionally as a ball-room. It was here that the "Öriginal Swiss Bell Ringers" made their first appearance in New York, and here, about the year 1845, I saw for the first time in my life a conjurer, or "magician." He was a dapper little man, whose name, Herr Alexandre, was suggestive of a German-French origin, but whose unmistakably cockney accent proclaimed him an Englishman. His tricks were well done, his audience was pleased. As for myself, I sat from first to last in a delightful dream. Dream, do I say? Nothing of the sort; I was wide awake, but living in fairy-land, and such an impression did that performance make on me, that I believe I could, even now, repeat the entire programme. That night's performance shaped my life, for I mentally resolved that at some future day I too would become a magician, astonish the gaping crowd, and reap wealth. And I did; that is, I entered the "profession," and have done my share at mystifying the public, but the wealth -! Among the many wonders of that night, one impressed me more than any, in fact than all the others. It was modestly set down on the bills as "an illustration of Mlle. Bertha's clairvoyant power while under mesmeric influence," and consisted of a minute description of such articles as the audience chose to offer, by a young girl who sat blindfolded and at a distance on the stage. The trick made a hit, and Alexandre was on the road to success, when Bertha, who was his daughter, died quite suddenly. This closed the entertainments, and the heart-broken conjurer returned to England.

After him came Macallister, the Scotch conjurer, with his wife, and then Anderson, the soi-disant "Wizard of the North." They both advertised heavily for those days, but as a performer neither equaled Alexandre, nor did they do the "clairvoyant" trick. That was the problem I was trying to work out, and when, in the fall of 1852, John VOL. XXI.-5.

Hall Wilton, a well-known theatrical agent, brought Robert Heller to this country, I was naturally anxious to see what he had to show. Poor Heller! clever conjurer and prince of good fellows! How well I remember his first poster:

"Shakspere wrote well,
Dickens wrote Weller;
Anderson was

But the greatest is Heller."

His first bow to a New York audience was made just before Christmas, 1852, in the basement of the Chinese Assembly Rooms. It was an invitation affair, and the company was made up, almost exclusively, of journalists and actors. Heller had been led to suppose that a Frenchman would draw better than an Englishman; accordingly, he appeared in a black wig, with his mustache colored to match, and began his performance with a short address in French. Then he continued in broken English, did a few simple tricks, and finally reached the crowning feat of the evening, one which eventually made his fortune,-"Second-sight." His assistant was His assistant was a young man whose answers were precision itself, and the trick was received with an enthusiasm for which Heller was altogether unprepared.

The audience was of the character of a family gathering; all were acquainted, and many were the loud and outspoken suggestions as to how "second-sight" was done.

Finally, a well-known newspaper man started from his seat, and called the "Professor" to him.

"Let your man tell what that is," he said, handing Heller a card.

"That is a ticket-a ball ticket," came the answer.

"Right so far, my boy; but tell me the name of the ball," insisted the journalist. The assistant hesitated for a moment, and said "The Thistle Ball."

"Ventriloquism, by

!" shouted the excited journalist, and this explanation was very generally accepted by the audience, who soon dispersed, pleased with the performance, and still more with the consciousness of having solved a clever trick.

Since that day, more than one explanation of the trick has been offered, the favorite one