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a weekly journal of prosperous circulation. After that for some 12 years he resided in New York, and in his own words "worked as printer and writer, (with an occasional shy at 'poetry')". In 1847-8 he edited the Brooklyn Eagle, and in 1849-50 the New Orleans Crescent. In 1851-2 he edited the Brooklyn Freeman. But all this work was thoroughly commonplace. The reprinted sketches from his Eagle, and another entitled "The Last of the Sacred Army", resuscitated by the New York World, show no ability in any way remarkable.

His story of "Death in the School-Room", which he marks "a fact", published in the Democratic Review for August, 1841, is perhaps as often referred to as any of his early stories; but it is a lugubrious tale, which we certainly should not publish if it was sent to us by anybody now, and which we hardly feel like reproducing even to illustrate his early style.

VII

In his "Specimen Days ", which is made. up largely of memoranda scribbled at all

times and in all places, on his theory that whatever thoughts he had were to be jotted down at once and preserved, there is much that reminds one of his poetry. Indeed, there are passages that are almost as poetical as anything in what he has arranged in His memoranda of the war, made up largely from letters written to the New York Times, have much freshness of contemporary and sympathetic description.

verses.

Of his "Democratic Vistas" Rudolf Schmidt says that it leaves the strongest impression of an elevated and cultivated mind glancing with penetration upon all the events of its time and people, and that it is of its kind the most pregnant thing that has ever been written, uniting the fire of the poet and the lucidity of the thinker with the marvellous foresight of the seer.

This is not, however, the usual judgment; if he had written only prose his name would soon have been forgotten.

VIII

But in 1854 he began writing "Leaves of Grass", and the next year the first edition appeared, printed in Brooklyn from type set

Leaves of Grass

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up in part by himself. This leap into literature brought him at a bound to the highest pitch he ever attained, and it is by these first poems mainly that he is known and judged.

Burroughs remarks:

The student of Whitman's life and works will be early struck by three things,-his sudden burst into song, the maturity of his work from the first, and his self-knowledge and self-estimate. The fit of inspiration came upon him suddenly; it was like the flowering of the orchards in spring; there was little or no hint of it till almost the very hour of the events.

IX

The most remarkable thing about the book is that it is a revealment of his personality. He says himself:

This is no book,

Who touches this touches a man.

He seeks to portray himself in all his physical, mental, moral, and immoral attributes.

See me, he says, the average man of the nineteenth century, just as I am, with all the conventions and lies and shams stripped off, leaving my intellectual and emotional processes absolutely naked to view10.

He said himself at a round table held in his honor:

As I have said, back of everything that is very grand, and very erudite, and very scientific, and very everything that is splendid in our era, is the simple individual critter, personality, if you please - his emotionality, supreme emotionality. Through that personality I have myself spoken, reiterated. That is behind "Leaves of Grass". It is the utterance of personality after-carefully remember— after being all surcharged with those other elements*.

X

Since Leaves of Grass" is a photograph of his personality, the character of Walt Whitman becomes even more important in the criticism of his works than in the case of other poets. The more his life is studied the more he will seem to deserve O'Connor's name of "the good, gray poet". He was in the first place wonderfully sympathetic and kind hearted, especially among laborers.

He was fond of riding np and down the omnibuses on Broadway, and he says:

I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly entered into the gestation of "Leaves of Grass "3.

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In the latter part of 1850 he was a frequent visitor at the New York hospital, looking after and ministering to a disabled stagedriver's family, and his four years of service in the hospitals of Washington during the war only developed a readiness to minister to others which was native. Speaking of the passing of a regiment of Confederate prisoners he says:

As I stood quite close to them, several good-looking enough youths (but O what a tale of misery their appearance told), nodded or just spoke to me, without doubt divining pity and fatherliness out of my face, for my heart was full enough of it3.

This sympathy for the individual man developed into a sympathy for humanity, and especially for sinners.

Traubel quotes him as saying in his old age

If I were to write my "Leaves" over again I should put in more toleration, and even receptivity for those we call bad, and the criminal1.

ΧΙ

The best test of his philosophy was that he believed in it and lived it. At the time when paralysis compelled him to give up his clerkship in Washington, when he began to suffer