"Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health, rudeness of body, withdrawness,

Gaiety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems,"

words not rhyming, it is true, but is it nothing that the poet has faiths and visions and power to illumine life and death, nothing that he has the faculty of divining amid our prosaic age the universal genius of romance? Do we really care for truth anyhow? Do we really long for a fuller life, however given us? Or shall we be content with the poet whose lines jingle properly, careless whether truth be in them or out of them? Whitman endows us at least with the gift of life. And is not the problem of art, after all, the human problem, - that which thought has of reconciling form and spirit, and of interpreting both from the centre of man's mind? "The artist," said Goethe, "must work from within outward, seeing that make what contortions he will he can only bring to light his own individuality. I can clearly mark where this influence of mine has made itself felt; there arises out of it a kind of poetry of nature." We recall the remark of Wordsworth about Goethe's poetry that it was not "inevitable enough," - that is, too little spontaneous. The phrases admirably describe Whitman's poetry, which is at its best as inevitable as Nature itself, a spontaneous utterance of an entire personality, egoistic, bombastic, as you will. Poetry is the means taken to realize the poet's self; it is the house of his mind he is building. The work wants perfection because the architect has himself in view, and is seeking to express what thought is generated within rather than to give artistic completeness to what is without. He seeks to embody spirit, and not imprison. The thought at least is adequate to the life of man. I seem to see some faultless versifier putting 'Leaves of Grass' into rhyme :

Give the chalk here- quick, thus the line should go!
Ay, but the soul! he 's Rafael! rub it out!"

(Andrea del Sarto,' - the faultless painter.)

Better so: Leaves of Grass' is true to Nature; it is an organic whole whose parts are vitally wedded in a new harmony where

rudeness, discords, enter that we may doubly prize the loveliness

"Smile O voluptuous cool breath'd earth!

Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!

Earth of departed sunset-earth of the mountains, misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!

Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow'd earth - rich apple-blossom'd earth!

Smile for your lover comes."

Whitman's positive artistic contribution is above all else the sense of wonder which he applies to the treatment of life. He is the poet of joy. He has tossed a new gladness among us, wrought of wonder at the sight of the sky and sea, the body and soul, good and evil, life and death. What is it to live and to die? We know what the ancients thought of death, to wander, a bodiless shade, over the joyless meadows thick with asphodel. In the Middle Ages Death was pictured as a skeleton-archer with inevitable shaft, or as a hideous form summoning every man from his garden of delights to the tomb, or charactered perchance in the people's plays as a grim musician, leading a world-procession to the charnel-house of the grave. The men of the Renaissance also, rejoicing in the full life of the senses, and still under the influence of medieval thought, could but turn with a shudder from the thought of Eld and Death. Raleigh could write over the beauty, greatness, ambitions of men only two narrow, melancholy words, "Hic jacet." This is what Claudio thought was death :"To die and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot."

Milton for the first time broke with the past, though keeping in mind the judgment day of the Puritan creed, and expressing his grief in terms of classical monody, and saw the soul of Lycidas not as dead, but as risen; along other groves and streams Lycidas laves his locks with nectar, and "hears the inexpressive nuptial song" in the blest kingdom of the saints. Many are the modern poets who have sung of death attesting to the continued power

of the thought over the soul of man.

Death is now robbed of its

terrors. Shelley takes a natural view, and sees the spirit of Keats as "awakened from the dream of life":

"He is made one with Nature; there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird!"
"Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came."

In comparison with the centuries' elegiac songs I do not hesitate in placing the matchless 'Burial Hymn of Lincoln,' which is, as Swinburne notes, the most solemn nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world; it is to other elegies what Beethoven's ninth symphony is to other symphonies. In a chant of wonderful beauty, the divinity of death is sung. Whitman sings the very loveliness of death. It is wonderful to be here, "underfoot the divine soil, over head the sun." It is as wonderful to depart. The soul, equipped at last, its sails all spread, moves out into the loving, Infinite Sea, there to fulfil Time and Space. Death leads toward life, perhaps the only real life, and we are the spectres. Death is a part of the world-order; it is plan, happiness; it is beautiful, mystical, an object of desire, worthy a chant of fullest welcome. And it must not be forgotten that the song issues from the heart of one who has intimate acquaintance with death in its most awful forms, the wounds of battle-fields.

“Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading, Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,

But not a tear fell, nor even a long-drawn sigh; long, long I gazed,

Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands, Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystical hours, with you dear comrade—not a :ear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier."

His soldier-comrades are heard to say "good-by" and with the same breath say "hail,"

"As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms;

and the poet is filled by the very wonder of the process with a sense of the strange and solemn beauty of death.

To conclude, I would that this study were animated more by the spirit of the student than by that of an advocate. How should one who is only anxious to know things as they really are so temper his words of interpretation that he may not offend those who find no justification for Leaves of Grass' at all? We gain nothing by being ungenerous, even to a book. It is only when we plunge soul-forward into a book's profound that we get the right good. We have yet to learn that one book does not counterpart another book any more than one eyesight counterparts another eyesight. There may be any number of supremes. Each book makes the growth by which alone it can be appreciated. "Every author," said Wordsworth," so far as he is great and at the same time original has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed; so has it been, so will it continue to be." 'Leaves of Grass,' as I read and re-read it, is inexhaustible in suggestive thoughts. Those who suppose Whitman to be lacking in ideas should think a moment of the thought, and passion also, stored in these lines:

"You are not thrown to the winds; you gather certainly and safely around yourself." "What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior." "This then is life, here; what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions." "I am myself just as much evil as good and my nation is - and I say there is in fact no evil." "Clear and sweet is my soul and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul."

"In this broad earth of ours,

Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection."

Then who learns these lessons complete is surprised to find it is no lesson at all: it only lets down the bars to a lesson, and that to another, and every one to another still. You are given to form for yourself lessons, poems, religions, politics, behavior, duty, and life. And this is the test of the poet who would assume to sing for America, for whose future is reserved the crowning triumph of history, countless complete personalities.

"Think of the United States to-day, the facts of these thirtyeight or forty empires solder'd in one- sixty or seventy millions

of equals, with their lives, their passions, their future- these incalculable modern American, seething multitudes around us, of which we are inseparable parts. Think in comparison of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past and present Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the absence and ignorance in all cases hitherto of the multitudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulus of to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the democratic masses never was." (Whitman: A Backward Glance.')

T

AT INSPECTION.

I. Adagio.

Oscar L. Triggs.

HAT girl ought to be court-martialled!" said the colonel's wife, and glared through her lorgnette, with a glare before which the bravest men in her husband's regiment had more than once quailed.

The colonel's spectacled gaze followed his wife's to that corner of the post library where, under a festoon of flags, Peggy Warrington was holding court, surrounded seven deep, or thereabouts, with gentlemen in United States uniform.

"I don't see exactly why, my dear," said the colonel. The colonel had just taken a second glass of champagne; which explains the temerity of his mild contradiction, where usually he gave unquestioning and unqualified assent.

"Why?" said she. "Because Peggy Warrington is simply disorganizing the service; and that's why!"

"It seems to me, my dear," said the colonel (really that champagne must have been of uncommonly bracing quality!), — “ it seems to me, my dear, that just at present Miss Warrington is uniting the service!"