poetic-which he does not find. Trollope's point of view is real and perfectly natural, but it is low. His parsons, whether they are bishops, prebendaries, deans, vicars, or curates, are, as a rule, the selfish men of everyday life. Their wives are more worldly and selfish than they. What, then, is the mission of the novelist—to educate or to depict? The numerous readers of the popular author must answer this. Literary fame is a thing of slow growth, generally. Anthony Trollope began with a story, historical and dull, entitled "La Vendée," published by Colburn in 1850. He had missed his mark, but he soon rectified the mistake. In 1855 he published "The Warden," being the history of the Rev. Septimus Harding, warden of Hiram's Hospital, in the city of Barchester. Two years later, "Barchester Towers" appeared; in 1858, "Dr. Thorne," another story of churchmen; and in the same year, "The Three Clerks," a story of legal and political life. In 1859, the prolific pen of the author furnished Mudie's subscribers with "The Bertrams," and an Irish story, "The Kellys and the O'Kellys." In the next year (1860), "Castle Richmond" made its appearance; and then Thackeray invited Mr. Trollope to open the ball in the "Cornhill" with a new story. This story, "Framley Parsonage," is one of his best productions. It is a charming piece of genre painting in ink, and did its part in maintaining his reputation, if it did not add anything to it. Orley Farm" (1862), “Rachel Ray" (1863), "The Small House at Allington," and "Can You Forgive Her?" followed in 1864, almost together; "Miss Mackenzie" in '65, and "The Belton Estate" in '66. In '67, "The Last Chronicle of Barset," and "The Claverings;" in '69, "He Knew He was Right," and "Phineas Finn." "The Vicar of Bullhampton, "Sir Harry Hotspur, of Humblethwaite," "Ralph the Heir," and "The Golden Lion of Granpere," close the list. What other novelist has written as many stories of even merit? They are all below the high mark of the great writers; but all are interesting, all show good sound art in their manipulation. They represent a great total of work, conscientiously performed. It seems well, in these fast times, to keep the ball rolling. Mrs. Henry Wood, Miss Braddon, and Anthony Trollope have laid this truth to heart. They have all of them a public, and they always take care to provide amusement for their readers. Something of theirs is always "going on somewhere." This policy is sound. Fashions and tastes change, new writers may spring up, or old ones wear out. They charm while they may, while their copy has a market value, and act on that most excellent proverb of making their hay while the sun shines. It is well that they should do so; and nobody's hay, old or new, is sweeter in the mouth than that of the writer whose books we have named. He is an artist who goes to nature for his materials; whose puppets are flesh and blood, not clothes-horses; and against whom the only fault we have to bring is that he has, perhaps, too much" to parsons given up, what was meant for mankind." WALT WHITMAN. THE Americans have often been twitted with having no distinctive literature of their own; and the answer to the accusation-which is questionable, after all-is that the Americans, as a nation, are yet young, and that the development of the peculiar intellectual genius of the nation, like that of its boundless natural resources, is only a matter of time. A man, however, has lately sprung up among them whom his admirers exalt as the greatest poet that ever lived, and his opponents denounce as a literary lunatic, writing, under pretence of verse, neither rhyme, rhythm, nor good sober prose. As in most fierce discussions, so in this concerning the true place of Walt Whitman, both sides are extravagantly wrong. Whitman is neither the greatest poet that ever lived, nor is he a raving madman. Walt Whitman is peculiarly an American production. His poems may be said to be essentially filled with an American spirit, to breathe the American air, and to assert the fullest American freedom. It is for this reason that many people on this side of the Atlantic will not take the trouble to study him as he deserves to be studied. His ideas, and his manner of expression, jar at the first reading on our old formal notions of what poetry should be, and how it should be expressed. Browning is rugged enough, in all conscience; and he pays a heavy penalty of unpopularity for his peculiar style. While Tennyson, and others of the smooth, volup tuous, sensuous school, hold temporary sway over the ears of society, the strong singers of more Spartan mould must bide their time. Imagine the feelings of any idle reader who, after having just read the Laureate's "Miller's Daughter," or "Oriana," carelessly opens Walt Whitman to the following tune, from his "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry": I. "Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face: Clouds of the west! Sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. II. "Crowds of men and women, attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; And you that shall from shore years hence are The account of the affair, by an American writer, is curious: "It was about ten years ago that literary circles in and around Boston were startled by the tidings that Emerson-whose incredulity concerning American books was known to be as profound as that of Sydney Smith -had discovered an American poet. Emerson had been for many years our literary banker: paper that he had inspected, coin that he had rung on his counter, would pass safely anywhere. "On his table had been laid one day a queerly shaped book, entitled 'Leaves of Grass. By Walt Whitman.' There was also in the front the portrait of a middle-aged man, in the garb of a working man. "The Concord philosopher's feelings on more to me, and more in my meditations, than perusing this book were expressed in a priyou might suppose. III. "The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; The simple, compact, well-joined scheme-myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme; The similitudes of the past, and those of the future; The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings-on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river; The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away; The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them; The certainty of others-the life, love, sight, hearing of others." But this is enough to give an idea of what a shock would happen to the nerves of any ordinary dilletante reader of poetry, and we candidly confess there would be some excuse for immediate dislike of the new poet. The contrast is too startling between the smooth, old-fashioned couplets of our orthodox English verse, and this wild, free, reckless voice of the fields, and the rivers, and the backwoods of far Massachusetts. Hence, it may safely be said that it is upon these first openings of his works by inquiring lovers of mere pleasant, mellifluous verse that Walt Whitman has been condemned. The first taste was enough; and it remained for men of broader and more philosophic ideas, who look upon true poetry as something more than fine words, to discover that there really was something, after all, in this wild poet of the prairies. The first man of any note to appreciate this novus homo was Ralph Waldo Emerson. vate letter to its author, which I quote from memory: "At first, I rubbed my eyes, to find if this new sunbeam might not be an illusion. . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start."" Praise such as this from the veteran of American literature is no mean recommendation. To no one of his own countrymen and no one before living, except Carlylehad Emerson previously written so forcibly. But Emerson's feeling may well be understood by any one who will carefully read— as they assuredly will some day be readWhitman's poems. Emerson had long lamented, in his own nervous, vigorous fashion, that the American freeman was becoming "timid, imitative, tame," from listening too long to "the courtly muses of Europe." And here, in this new man, unlike any man who had ever before written or sung, whichever you like to call it, he fancied he saw a pioneer, as it were, to the Promised Land of a new and distinctive American song. "It is," said Emerson of "Leaves of Grass,' "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." An able critic has written forcibly on the genius of this first important work of Whit man. "The plainness of speech in 'Leaves of Grass' is indeed biblical. From its first sentence-'I celebrate myself'-there starts forth an endless procession of the forms and symbols of life: now funeral, now carnival; or, again, a masquerade of nations, cities, epochs; or the elements, natural and human, fascinating the eye with wonder or dread. To these terrible eyes Maya surrendersfaces, forms, skeletons are unsheathed. Here are the autographs of New York, and of the prairies, savannahs, Ohio, Mississippi, and all powers, good and evil. There is much that is repulsive to the ordinary mind in these things, and in the poems that really express them; but, as huge reptiles help to fashion the pedestal of man-as artists find in griffins and crouching animal forms the fundamental vitality upon which the statue or pillar may repose-one might not unreasonably find in the wild, grotesque forms of Walt Whitman's chants, so instinct with life, the true basis of any shaft, not the duplicate of any raised elsewhere, that American thought is to raise." The aim, purpose, and leading principle of Whitman's productions are best explained in a letter of his own to a friend, in which he says: "I assume that poetry in America needs to be entirely recreated. On examining, with anything like deep analysis, what now prevails in the United States, the whole mass of poetical works, long and short, consist either of the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, at bottom nothing but maudlin puerilities, or more or less musical verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and enervation, as their result; or else that class of poetry, plays, &c., of which the foundation is feudalism, with its ideas of lords and ladies, its imported standard of gentility, and the manners of European high life below stairs in every line and verse. . . . Instead of mighty and vital breezes, proportionate to our continent, with its powerful races of men, its tremendous historic events, its great oceans, its mountains, and its illimitable prairies, I find a few little silly fans languidly moved by shrunken fingers." His ambition is, he continues in the same letter, "to give something to our literature which will be our own; with neither foreign spirit, nor imagery, nor form, but adapted to our case, grown out of our associations, boldly portraying the West, strengthening and intensifying the national soul, and finding the entire fountains of its birth and growth in our own country.” How far he will succeed in his purpose time alone can decide. But as a sort of encouragement to our readers to make a further acquaintance for themselves with the oracular expressions of this original genius, we will give a few specimens of what he himself, at | least, calls his poems. As a rule, Whitman eschews the old style of giving set titles to poems. Most of them are merely headed with the opening words of the poems themselves-as, "I was looking a long while," "To get betimes in Boston town," "When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed," and so on. Mr. Rossetti, however, in his English selection of Whitman's poems, has appended titles of his own, which, for the sake of convenience, we will here adopt. The following, entitled "The Past-Present," is Walt Whitman in his glory:— "I was looking a long while for the history of the past for myself, and for these chants-and now I have found it. It is not in those paged fables in the libraries It is no more in the legends than in all else: It is the life of one man or one woman to-day, the It is languages, social customs, literatures, arts; The following opening of "Years of the Unperformed," if not poetry in the hackneyed sense of the term, is the voice of the true prophet: "Years of the unperformed! Your horizon rises. I see it part away for more august dramas: I see not America only-I see not only liberty's nation, but other nations embattling. I see tremendous entrances and exits, I see new combinations, I see the solidarity of races; I see that force advancing, with irresistible power, on the world's stage. Have the old forces played their parts? Are the acts suitable to them closed?" "Old Ireland," of which we have not space for more than the first stanza, is, we think, very beautiful: "Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty, crouching over a grave, an ancient sorrowful mother, Once a queen, now lean and tattered, seated on the ground; Her old white hair drooping dishevelled round her shoulders; At her feet fallen an unused royal harp, Long silent. She, too, long silent-mourning her shrouded hope and heir; Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love." Of the political idea conveyed in this we say nothing; but as a picture, it is intensely human. There is little rhyme throughout Whitman's "poems," and perhaps, some people may be inclined to say, little rhythm either; but that this arises more from Walt's disdain for the mechanical resources of other poets than from any want of a good musical ear may be seen from the following dirge for Abraham Lincoln, which is very touching:"O captain-O captain! our fearful trip is done— The ship has weathered every rock, the prize we sought is won; The port is near, the bells I hear-the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring. But heart, heart, heart! Fallen cold and dead. We have quoted enough, we think, even in these brief extracts, to show that Walt Whitman is more of a poet than his adverse critics will allow. The only excuse for their opposition is, perhaps, that they have not yet learnt to understand the man. We confess to sharing the weakness of many who, in studying the genius and intellect of a teacher of men, are anxious also to know all they can of his personal life. A preacher may charm an admiring congregation with the most saintlike of sermons; but it does not follow of necessity that he is not as erring a sinner as any among his flock. The philosopher, like Bacon, may utter the noblest and loftiest sentiments, yet be at the same time the "meanest of mankind." So the poet may wake the pulses of men with the purest and most God-like of truths, yet be by no means the most admired and respected personally by those who have the privilege of an acquaintance more intimate than the mere knowledge of his genius. For this reason, after our remarks on the poetry of Walt Whitman, we give a sketch of his personnel by one of his own countrymen, who, while an enthusiastic admirer of the poet, yet seems to speak from his heart: "For years past," says Dr. Douglas O'Connor, of Massachusetts, in a pamphlet called the "Good Gray Poet," "thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I saw two hours ago, tallying, one might say, with the streets of our American cities, and fit to have for his background and accessories their streaming populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking masculine beauty-a poet: powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm, superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people; resembling, and generally taken by strangers for, some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand labourer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise, with nonchalant and haughty steps, along the pavement, with The dark sombrero he usually wears was, the light and shadows falling around him. when I saw him just now-the day being warm-held for the moment in his hands. Rich light, an artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered head-majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. I marked the countenance-serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow, seamed with noble wrinkles; the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that fulness of arch seldom seen save in the antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling faint |