be taken into account. It is upon these that he himself always lays the most weight. He once said to the present writer, "The "fifteen years from 1840 to 1855 were the gestation or formative periods of Leaves of Grass, not only in Brooklyn and New York, "but from several extensive jaunts through the States—including "the Western and Southern regions and cities, Baltimore, Cin"cinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Texas, the Mississippi "and Missouri Rivers, the great lakes and Niagara, and through "New York from Buffalo to Albany. Large parts of the poems, "and several of them wholly, were incarnated on those jaunts or "amid these scenes. Out of such experiences came the physiology of Leaves of Grass, in my opinion the main part. The "psychology of the book is a deeper problem; it is doubtful "whether the latter element can be traced. It is, perhaps, only "to be studied out in the poems themselves, and is a hard study "there." At another time, speaking with more than usual deliberation to a group of medical men, friends of his, in answer to their inquiries, on an occasion where I was present, he said, "One main "object I had from the first was to sing, and sing to the full, the ecstasy of simple physiological Being. This, when full develop"ment and balance combine in it, seemed, and yet seems, far "beyond all outside pleasures; and when the moral element and "an affinity with Nature in her myriad exhibitions of day and "night are found with it, makes the happy Personality, the true "and intended result (if they ever have any) of my poems." This last sentence contains a key to the central secret of Leaves of Grass-that this book, namely, represents a man whose ordinary every-day relationship with Nature is such that to him mere existence is happiness. The problem then before him was to express not what he heard, or saw, or fancied, or had read, but one far deeper and more difficult to express, namely, Himself. To put the man Walt Whitman Sin his book, not especially dressed, polished, prepared, not for conventional society, but for Nature, for God, for America-given as a man gives himself to his wife, or as a woman gives herself to her husband-whole, complete, natural-with perfect love, joy, and trust. This is something that, as I believe, was never before dared or done in literature. This is the task that he set for himself, and that he has accomplished. If the man were merely an ordinary person, such a purpose, such a book, written with absolute sincerity, would possess the most extraordinary interest; but Leaves of Grass has an interest far greater, derived from the exceptional personality which is embodied in it. Such was, in outline or brief suggestion, the intention with which it was written, and the reason for writing it. Then I think a profound part of the forecasting of the work was the way in which many things were left open for future adjustment. By the spring of 1855, Walt Whitman had found or made a style in which he could express himself, and in that style he had (after, as he has told me, elaborately building up the structure, and then utterly demolishing it, five different times) written twelve poems, and a long prose preface which was simply another poem. Of these he printed a thousand copies. It was a thin quarto, the preface filling xii., and the body of the book 95 pages, on rather poor paper, and in the type printers call "English." The large title-page has the words "LEAVES OF GRASS, Brooklyn, New York, 1855," only. Facing the title is the miniature of a man who looks about thirty-five to forty years old. He wears a broadbrimmed, wide-awake hat, has a large forehead and stronglymarked features. The face (to my mind) expresses sadness and good nature. No part of the face is shaved. The beard is clipped rather short and is turning gray. The figure is shown down to the knees. This is Walt Whitman from life in his thirty-sixth year. The picture was engraved on steel by McRae, of New York, from a daguerreotype taken one hot day in July, 1854, by Gabriel Harrison, of Brooklyn. (The same picture is used in the current 1882 edition.) The twelve poems constituting the body of the book are unnamed, except for the words Leaves of Grass, which are used as a page heading throughout, and besides as a heading to some, but not all, of the individual pieces. Giving those twelve 1855 poems the names that they bear in the ultimate 1882 edition, the first eleven are: 1. Song of Myself. 2. A Song for Occupations. 3. To Think of Time. 4. The Sleepers. 5. I Sing the Body Electric. 6. Faces. The twelfth, though retained ent, 1882, is omitted from that. "Great are the Myths.” 7. Song of the Answerer. 8. Europe the 72d and 73d Years of 9. A Boston Ballad (1854). 10. There was a Child went forth. in every edition until the pres- The book now being manufactured, copies of it were left for sale at various bookstores in New York and Brooklyn. Other copies were sent to magazines and newspapers, and others to prominent literary men. Of those that were placed in the stores none were sold. Those that were sent to the press were, in quite every instance, either not noticed at all, laughed at, or reviewed with the bitterest and most scurrilous language in the vocabulary of the reviewer's contempt. Those sent to eminent writers were in several instances returned, in some cases accompanied by insulting notes. The first reception of Leaves of Grass by the world was in fact about as disheartening as it could be. Of the thousand copies of this 1855 edition, some were given away, most of them were lost, abandoned, or destroyed. It is certain that the book quite universally, wherever it was read, excited ridicule, disgust, horror, and anger. It was considered meaningless, badly written, filthy, atheistical, and utterly reprehensible. And yet there were a few, a very few indeed, who suspected from the first that under that rough exterior might be something of extraordinary beauty, vitality, and value. Among these was Ralph Waldo Emerson, then at the height of his splendid fame. He wrote to Walt Whitman the following letter: CONCORD, MASS., July 21st, 1855. DEAR SIR,-I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things, said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging. I did not know, until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R. W. EMERSQN. This letter was eventually published (at first refused by Walt Whitman, but on second and pressing application he consented), at the request of Chas. A. Dana, then managing editor of the "New York Tribune." Though it could not arrest, it did service in partially offsetting the tide of adverse feeling and opinion which overwhelmingly set in against the poet and his book. Walt Whitman has since been censured for printing a so-called private communication of opinion, not intended for the public. In answer to this, besides no proof that the letter was meant to be private, the editor of the "Tribune," who was a personal friend of both Walt Whitman and Mr. Emerson, would probably have been a judge in such matters, and he sought it for the columns of his paper, as legitimate and proper to both parties. It may be mentioned here that vastly as the two men, R. W. Emerson and Walt Whitman, differ in the outward show of their expression, there are competent scholars who accept both equally, and use them to complement each other.* The next year, 1856, the second edition of Leaves of Grass was published by Fowler & Wells, 308 Broadway, N. Y., but the * Emerson is the "knight-errant of the moral sentiment;" Whitman accepts the whole "relentless kosmos," and theoretically, at least, seems to blur the distinction between right and wrong. Emerson's pages are like beds of roses and violets; Whitman's like masses of sun-flowers and silken-tasselled maize. Emerson soars upward in Plato's chariot over the "flickering Dæmon film" into the pure realm "where all form in one only form dissolves," and when he returns his face and his raiment are glistening with light caught from that pure firm did not put its name on the title-page. The volume is a small 16mo. of 384 pages. The same miniature of the author is used. The words Leaves of Grass are the page-heading throughout that part of the volume containing the poems, and besides this general title, each poem has a name, but in no instance exactly the same as it bears in later issues. The total number of poems in this edition is thirty-two. The twenty new poems are (giving them as before the names they bear in the 1882-'83 edition): 15. To a Foil'd European Revolu tionaire. 16. A short poem part of which is 17. Miracles. 20. A Song of the Rolling Earth. The prose preface of the first edition did not appear as such in this second edition, but part of it was embodied in a few of the world of perfect types. But Whitman is like the ash-tree Ygdrasil, whose triple fountainnourished root symbolizes what was done, what is done, and what will be done, and the roaring storm-tossed boughs of it reach through the universe and bear all things in their arms. Emerson is the sweet and shining Balder; Whitman, Thor with hammer and belt of strength. Toss into the sunlight a handful of purest mountain lake water; the thousand droplets that descend, flash and burn with whitest light, and on the silvery surface of each a miniature world lies softly pictured in richest iridescence. Like these droplets are Emerson's sentences. But the writings of Whitman are the golden mirror of the moon lifted up out of immensity by some giant hand, that it may throw the refulgence of the sun down among the dark forests of earth, over its fair cities, sweet, flowery fields, and dark blue seas, concealing nothing, lighting earth's passion and its pain, its murders, its hatred and its hideousness, as well as its music, its poetry and its flowers.-Lecture of W. SLoane Kennedy. |