Amsterdam; of Oglethorpe's Georgia colony; of the French explorations about the great lakes; of the early Spanish missions in California; of the old French Creole life in New Orleans-what rich and ample materials are here, suggesting vast ethnic preparations and blendings of European peoples to form new combinations. We talk of lack of poetry, but the lack is in ourselves, not in the subject-matter.

But if there is idealism in this brief past, how much more in the vast future. Mr. Ruskin has declined to interest himself in America because there are no castles there. But castles were built by men, and the future of the human race will be there, not here. Whether we like it or not, the sceptre of commerce and industry will as surely pass to America within a very measurable distance of time as another day will dawn. Russia and America-diverse enough in many ways, but alike in their vast territorial expansion and assimilative capacity-seem destined to be the great political organisms, the world-powers of the future. This is Nature's decree, which cannot be set aside by any judgment from another court. A century hence most of the countries of Western Europe will be compared, not with America as a whole, but with separate States of the Union merely. Spiritually and artistically supreme, Europe will politically and commercially recede before the resounding tread of the Western and Eastern giants. But is this Titanic organism to be informed with no soul? That is the American problem, which Whitman has set himself to solve; he wants to help America to find her soul. A future

given up to the despotism of business, to the sway of the smart, vulgar, money-making animal, to dyspeptic middle-class religionism, to the election of lying rogues to office, to the universal reign of the mediocre and the commonplace-this is indeed a future from which the human race may well shrink.

Redemption will come, thinks Whitman, through the spiritual influences of the great poet, bard, seer— what you will. He will speak to the people on equal terms, will be "glad to pass anything to anyonehungry for equals night and day." He will be filled. with the "faith of the flush of knowledge;" he will understand that "the vital laws inclose all." To him "the idea of political liberty is indispensable;" he "sees health for himself in being one of the mass." There must be in him no tricks, but perfect personal candour, and he must understand that "all that a person does or thinks is of consequence." He is to lead the people, not as a master from above, but as a friend and comrade in their own ranks, passing on to them the bloom and odour of the earth, of the flowers, of the atmosphere, of the sea, radiant in strength, with a healthy dash of barbarism, yet recognising fully the value of the "long result of time." We may, in brief, sum up Whitman's idea of the modern redeemer, the light-bringer, the friend of man, in his own words: "The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides, if he be not himself the age transfigur'd, and if to him is not open'd the eternity which gives similitude to all

periods and locations and processes, and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shapes of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave-let him merge in the general run, and wait his development."

"1

Whitman's faith in America was revived by the heroism displayed by the average man in the Civil War; the heroism and the idealism also. "We have seen the alacrity with which the American-born popu. lace, the peaceablest and most good-natured race in the world, and the most personally independent and intelligent, and the least fitted to submit to the irksomeness and exasperation of regimental discipline, sprang, at the first tap of the drum, to arms-not for gain, nor even glory, nor to repel invasion-but for an emblem, a mere abstraction-for the life, the safety of the flag." " And he exultingly exclaims in "DrumTaps":

"I have witness'd the true lightning; I have witness'd my cities electric;

I have lived to behold man burst forth and warlike America rise." 3

1 Preface to First Issue of Leaves of Grass. Specimen Days and Collects, p. 273.

2 "Democratic Vistas." Specimen Days, p. 216. 3 Leaves of Grass, p. 230.

Spite of its materialism and hypocrisy, he has faith in the land, faith in the average man's firm resolution, courage, audacity, friendliness, fluid power. It is all, he thinks, latent in him, deep down beneath the outward froth and turbulence, the great, real, permanent fact. To mirror that calm, healthy, broad inner life, alike in its essential qualities and in its varied manifestations, was Whitman's own mission; and it must be, in his view, the true aim of American literature.

A

III-HIS ART.

WHEN beginning his self-imposed task, Whitman appears to have been staggered by the vastness of his own conceptions. The view was so extensive, the distance was so great, the sights that could be seen, and the tendencies that were unseen, so overwhelming, that the poet was intoxicated by the vision. He lacked, too, discrimination and art. He had absorbed divine influences from past thinkers, but he had no sense of the laws of style, or, indeed, the sense that there were any laws. Hence, the sometimes-one might be induced to say, the frequent-formless lines, and the attempts to produce effects which no great artist would have employed. The poet was unable, through lack of literary culture, to clothe his novel and often glowing conceptions in any ideal poetic form. Rather he flings his ideas at us in a heap, leaving it to us to arrange them in order in our own minds. His results, therefore, fail to satisfy many not unsympathetic readers. And yet of these results Mr. Havelock Ellis has truly said that "they have at times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen and incalculable, of Nature; yet always, according to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the poetry of art. When Whitman

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