of his substance till after the close of the war. It is claimed for him that he personally visited and ministered to over one hundred thousand sick and wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. Out of this experience grew his "Drum Taps," a thin volume of poems published in 1866. It was subsequently incorporated with his "Leaves." These were not battle-pieces, or songs of triumph over a fallen foe,

"But a little book containing night's darkness, and blooddripping wounds,

and psalms of the dead."

During these hospital years Whitman supported himself mainly by writing letters to the New York Times. His "Hospital Memoranda" include most of this material. He wrote copious letters to his mother at the same time, which were issued in book form during the fall of 1897 by his new Boston publishers, and named "The Wound-Dresser." From 1865 to 1873 Whitman occupied the desk of a government clerk in the Treasury Department. Previous to that time he had been dismissed from a position in the Interior Department by its head, James Harlan, because he was the author of "Leaves of Grass." His services in the army hospitals impaired his health, and early in 1873 he had a light stroke of paralysis. In the spring of that year he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his. brother, Colonel George Whitman, was living. Camden now became his permanent home. His health was much impaired, his means very limited, but his serenity and cheerfulness never deserted him. Many foreign travellers made pilgrimages to Camden to visit him. He was generally regarded by Europeans as the one distinctive American poet, the true outcome in literature of modern democracy. He died March 26, 1892, and his body is buried in a Camden cemetery in an imposing granite tomb of his own designing. Whitman never married. He was always poor, but he was a man much beloved by young and old of both sexes, while in a small band of men and women he inspired an enthusiasm and a depth of personal attachment rare in any age. In person he was a man of large and fine physical proportions and striking appearance. His tastes were simple, his wants few. He was a man singularly clean in both

speech and person. He loved primitive things; and his strongest attachments were probably for simple, natural, uneducated, but powerful, persons. The common, the universal- that which all may have on equal terms-was as the breath of his nostrils. In his "Leaves” he identifies himself fully with these elements, declaring that

"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me."

He aimed to put himself into a book, not after the manner of the gossiping essayist, like Montaigne, but after the manner of poetic revelation; and sought to make his pages give an impression analogous to that made by the living, breathing man. The "Leaves " are not beautiful like a statue, or any delicate and elaborate piece of carving; but beautiful, and ugly too if you like, as the living man or woman is beautiful or ugly. The appeal is less to our abstract, æsthetic sense, and more to our concrete, everyday sense of real things. This is not to say that our æsthetic perceptions are not stimulated; but only that they are appealed to in a different way, a less direct and premeditated way, than they are in the popular poetry. Without the emotion of the beautiful there can be no poetry; but beauty may be the chief aim and gathered like flowers into nosegays, as in most of the current poetry, or it may be subordinated and left as it were abroad in the air and landscape, as was Whitman's aim. His conviction was that beauty should follow the poet, never lead him.

Whitman aimed at a complete human synthesis, and left the reader to make of it what he could; and he is not at all disturbed if he finds the bad there as well as the good, as in life itself. A good deal of mental pressure must be brought to bear upon him before his full meaning and significance comes out.

Readers who idly dip into him for poetic tidbits or literary morceaux, or who open his "Leaves" expecting to be regaled with flowers and perfumes, will surely be disappointed if not shocked. His work does not belong to the class of literary luxuries or delicacies. It is primary and fundamental, and is only indirectly poetic; that is, it does not seek beauty so much as it seeks that which makes beauty. Its method is not exclu

sive, but inclusive. It is the work of a powerful spirit that seeks to grasp life and the universe as a whole, and to charge the conception with religious and poetic emotion; perhaps I should say religious emotion alone, as Whitman clearly identifies the two. Light readers only find now and then a trace of the poetic in his work; they fail to see the essentially poetic. character of the whole; and they fail to see that there is a larger poetry than that of gems and flowers. The poetry of pretty words and fancies is one thing; the poetry of vast conceptions and enthusiasm and of religious and humanitarian emotion is quite another.

Our pleasure in the rhymed, measured, highly wrought verse of the popular poets is doubtless more acute and instant than it is in the irregular dithyrambic periods of Whitman; the current poetry is more in keeping with the thousand and one artificial things with which the civilized man surrounds himself, perfumes, colors, music; the distilled, the highly seasoned, the elaborately carved,-wine, sweetmeats, cosmetics, etc. Whitman, in respect to his art and poetic quality, is more like simple, natural products, or the everyday family staples, meat, bread, milk, or the free unhoused elements, —frost, rain, spray. There is little in him that suggests the artificial in life, or that takes note of, or is the outcome of, the refinements of our civilization. Though a man of deep culture, yet culture cannot claim him as her own, and in many of her devotees repudiates him entirely. He let nature speak, but in a way that the uncultured man never could. In its tone and spirit his "Leaves of Grass" is as primitive as the antique bards, while it yet implies and necessitates modern civilization.

It is urged that his work is formless, chaotic. On the other hand, it may be claimed that a work that makes a distinct and continuous impression, that gives a sense of unity, that holds steadily to an ideal, that is never in doubt about its own method and aims, and that really grips the reader's mind or thought, is not in any deep sense formless. "Leaves of Grass" is obviously destitute of the arbitrary and artificial form of regular verse; it makes no account of the prosodical system, but its admirers claim for it the essential, innate form of all vital, organic things. There are imitations of Whitman that

are formless; one feels no will or purpose in them; they make no more impact upon the reader's mind than vapor upon his hand. A work is formless that has no motives, no ideas, no vertebra, no central purpose controlling and subordinating all the parts. In his plan, as I have said, Whitman aimed to outline a human life, his own life, here in democratic America in the middle of the nineteenth century, giving not merely its æsthetic and spiritual side, but its carnal side as well, and imbuing the whole with poetic passion. In working out this purpose, we are not to hold him to a mechanical definiteness and accuracy; he may build freely and range far and wide; a man is made up of many and contradictory elements, and his life is a compound of evil and of good. The forces that shape him are dynamic and not mechanic. If Whitman has confused his purpose, if all the parts of his work are not related more or less directly to this central plan, then is he in the true sense formless. The trouble with Whitman is, his method is that of the poet and not that of the essayist or philosopher. He is not the least didactic; he never explains or apologizes. The reader must take him on the wing or not at all. He does not state his argument so much as he speaks out of it and effuses its atmosphere.

Then he is avowedly the poet of vista: to open doors and windows, to let down bars rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms, to escape boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather than in a corner,- -this fact is the explanation of the general character of his work in respect to form.

Readers who have a keen sense of what is called artistic form in poetry, meaning the sense of the deftly carved or shaped, are apt to be repelled by the absence of all verse architecture in the poems. A hostile critic might say they are not builded up, but heaped up. But this would give a wrong impression, inasmuch as a piece of true literature bears no necessary analogy to a house or the work of the cabinet-maker. It may find its type or suggestion in a tree, a river, or in any growing or expanding thing. Verse perfectly fluid, and without any palpable, resisting, extrinsic form whatever, or anything to take his readers' attention away from himself and the content of his page, was Whitman's aim.

Opinion will doubtless long be divided about the value of his work. He said he was "willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste" of himself. That his taste is growing, that the new generations are coming more and more into his spirit and atmosphere, that the mountain is less and less forbidding, and looms up more and more as we get farther from it, is obvious enough. That he will ever be in any sense a popular poet is in the highest degree improbable; but that he will kindle enthusiasm in successive minds, that he will be an enormous feeder to the coming poetic genius of his country, that he will enlarge criticism, and make it easy for every succeeding poet to be himself and to be American, and, finally, that he will take his place among the few major poets of the race, I have not the least doubt.

JOHN BURROUGHS.