TO WALT WHITMAN. "I, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin, CHANTS DEMOCRATIC They say that thou art sick, art growing old, Thou Poet of unconquerable health, With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold, The never-blenching eyes, that did behold Life's fair and foul, with measureless content, And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent Over the dying soldier in the fold Of thy large comrade love ;- then broke the tear! Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now, ARRAN LEIGH (England). THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE. I. WHOEVER has witnessed the flight of any of the great birds, as the eagle, the condor, the sea-gulls, the proud hawks, etc., has perhaps felt that the poetic suggestion of the feathered tribes is not all confined to the sweet and tiny songsters the thrushes, canaries, and mocking-birds of the groves and orchards, or of the gilded cage in my lady's chamber. It is by some such analogy that I would indicate the character of the poetry I am about to discuss compared with that of the more popular and melodious singer; the poetry of the strong wing and the daring flight. Well and profoundly has a Danish critic said, in "For Ide og Virkelighed" (" For the Idea and the Reality"), a Copenhagen magazine: 66 "It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the elegance, special melody, nor recherché aroma of the accepted poets of Europe or his own country; but his compass and general harmony are infinitely greater. The sweetness and spice, the poetic ennui, the tender longings, the exquisite artfinish of those choice poets are mainly unseen and unmet in him—perhaps because he cannot achieve them more likely because he disdains them. But there is an electric living soul in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing. His wings do not glitter in their movement from rich and vari-colored plumage, nor are his notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight of the eagle." Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the outpouring of sweetest melody, and its lessons—but there is the delighting of the eye and soul through that soaring and circling in the vast empyrean of " a strong bird on pinions free "-lessons of freedom, power, grace, and spiritual suggestion — vast, unparalleled, formless lessons. It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in 1855) his first thin beginning volume of "Leaves of Grass;" and holding him to the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, "that the proof of the poet shall be sternly deferred till his country has absorb'd him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it," he is yet on trial, yet makes his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. That his complete absorption, however, by his own country, and by the world, is ultimately to take place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and stronger within me as time passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to help forward this absorption that I write of him now. Only here and there has he yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and more virile minds. But considering the unparalleled audacity of his undertaking, and the absence in most critics and readers of anything like full grown and robust æsthetic perception, the wonder really is not that he should have made such slow progress, but that he should have gained any foothold at all. The whole literary technique of the race for the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying as it does the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead of upon aboriginal power and manhood. My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much facilitated by contact talks, meals, jaunts, etc. with him, stretching through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his personnel was resumed and carried forward in his literary expression; in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other. After the test of time nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy, and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh, magnetic personality, making you love him, and want always to be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a deception, and all the impression of my perceptives a fraud. I have studied him as I have studied the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw. Nothing about a first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be studied in every feature, — in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear is as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman all these things are remarkably striking and sugges tive. His face exhibits a rare combination of harmony and sweetness with strength, strength like the vaults and piers of the Roman architecture. Sculptor never carved a finer ear or a more imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so now (1877) cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You know on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that if he achieve the height at all it will be from where every man stands, and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or litterateur, but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to make, that of a sweet blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, after an hour's interview, "that he suggested something a little more than human." In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life and personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be found in about the largest emotional element that has appeared anywhere. This, if not controlled by a potent rational balance, would either have tossed him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin. These |