sion. In former times Griswold and Duyckinck made similar collections of literature in American. As we have seen, both alike properly included many names for which Stedman and Hutchinson have found no room. It is hard to resist the conclusion that whoever shall make a new library of American literature, thirty or forty years hence, will by the same token find no place for many of our contemporaries momentarily preserved by our latest anthologists. As you turn their pages, you can hardly avoid feeling that, however valuable these may be as history, they contain little which merits permanence.

Depressing as this may at first seem to patriotic spirit, it has another aspect. As we look back on the literary records of New England, we can perceive in its local history a trait like one which has marked those more fortunate regions of the old world whose expression has proved lasting. Artistic expression is apt to be the final fruit of a society about to wither. For generations, or perhaps for centuries, traditions grow until they reach a form which locally distinguishes the spot which has developed them from any other in the world. Then, at moments of change, there sometimes arises, in a race about to pass from the living, a mysterious impulse to make plastic or written records of what the past has meant. These are what render even Greece and Italy and Elizabethan England more than mere names. So one gradually grows to feel that only the passing of old New England made its literature possible. The great material prosperity of New York, meanwhile, has attracted thither during the past forty years countless numbers of energetic people from all over the world, foreigners, New Englanders, Westerners, Southerners, and whomever else. In this immigrant invasion the old New York of Irving and Cooper and the rest has been swallowed up. There is now hardly a city in the world where you are so little apt to meet people whose families have lived there for three successive generations. Our new metropolis, in fact, is

not only far from such a stage of decline as should mark the beginning of its passage from life to history, but it has not even formed the tangible traditions which may by and by define its spiritual character.

What its features may finally be, then, we may only guess. On the whole, one inclines to guess hopefully. Beneath its bewildering material activity there is a greater vitality, a greater alertness, and in some aspects a greater wholesomeness, of intelligence than one is apt to find elsewhere. It is not that the artists and the men of letters who live there have done work which even on our American scale may be called great. It is not that these men, or men who shall soon follow them, may be expected to make lasting monuments. It is rather that about them surges, with all its fluctuating good and evil, the irresistible tide of world-existence. The great wealth of New York and its colossal material power, of course, involve a social complexity, and at least a superficial corruption, greater than America has hitherto known; and the men who live amid this bustling turmoil are habitually in contact with base things. Yet hundreds of them, sound at heart, think and speak with a buoyant courage which, even to a New Englander, seems almost youthfully to preserve that fresh simplicity of heart so characteristic of our ancestrally inexperienced America. You may shake your head at them, or smile, as much as you will; they impart to you, despite yourself, a mood of inexplicably brighter hopefulness than their words, or the facts which those words set forth, seem to justify.

So, very generally, we may say that our Middle States, as they used to be called, are now dominated by New York. This town, whose domination for the moment is not only local but almost national, owes its predominance to that outburst of material force which throughout the victorious North followed the period of the Civil War. What may come of it no one can tell. Of the past and the present there is little

to remark beyond what we have remarked already. There is,

however, one exception. The Middle States, and to a great degree the city of New York itself, have produced just one eccentric literary figure, who has emerged into an isolation which is sometimes believed eminent. This is Walt Whitman

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WALT WHITMAN

WALT WHITMAN was older than one is apt to remember. He was born on Long Island in 1819, and he died in 1892. His life, then, was almost exactly contemporary with Lowell's. No two lives could have been much more different in condition. Lowell, the son of a minister, closely related to the best people of New England, lived all his life amid the gentlest academic and social influences in America. Whitman was the son of a carpenter and builder on the outskirts of Brooklyn; the only New England man of letters equally humble in origin was Whittier.

The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, is almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. Whittier, the child of Quaker farmers in the Yankee country, grew up and lived almost all his life amid guileless influences. Whitman, born of the artisan class in a region close to the most considerable and corrupt centre of population on his native continent, had a rather vagrant youth and manhood. At times he was a printer, at times a school-master, at times editor of stray country newspapers, and by and by he took up his father's trade of carpenter and builder, erecting a number of small houses in his unlovely native region. Meanwhile he had rambled about the country and into Canada, in much the temper of those wanderers whom we now call tramps; but in general until past thirty years old, he was apt to be within. scent of the East River. The New York of which his erratic habits thus made the lower aspects so familiar to him was passing, in the last days of the Knickerbocker School, into

its metropolitan existence. The first edition of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" appeared in 1855, the year which produced the "Knickerbocker Gallery."

nurse.

During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army After the war, until 1873, he held some small government clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a paralytic stroke brought his active life to an end; for his last twenty years he lived an invalid at a little house in Camden, New Jersey.

Until 1855, when the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his own hands, Whitman had not declared himself as a man of letters. From that time to the end he was constantly publishing his eccentric poetry, which from time to time he collected in increasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, some stray volumes of prose," Democratic Vistas," and the like. Prose and poetry alike seem permeated with a conviction that he had a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democracy, which he believed characteristic of his country. To himself, then, he seemed the inspired prophet of an America which he asserted to be above all things else the land of the people; few men have ever cherished a purpose more literally popular. His fate has been ironic. Though even in his lifetime he became conspicuous, it is doubtful whether any man of letters in his country ever appealed less to the masscs. He was a prophet of democracy, if you like; but the public to which his prophecy made its way was at once limited, fastidiously overcultivated, and apt to be of foreign birth.

Beyond question Whitman had remarkable individuality and power. Equally beyond question he was among the most eccentric individuals who ever put pen to paper. The natural result of this has been that his admirers have admired him intensely; while whoever has found his work repellent has found it irritating. Particularly abroad, however, he has attracted much critical attention; and many critics have been disposed to maintain that his amorphous prophecies of democracy are