Come drizzlin' on my conscience sharp ez pins:

Wal, et sech times I jes' slip out o' sight,

An' take it out in a fair stan' up fight
With the one cuss I can't lay on the shelf,
The crook'dest stick in all the heap,—myself.

FROM "THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION

ODE"

(A poem read by Lowell at a commemoration service in honor of Harvard men who had fallen in the Civil War, July 21, 1865.)

III

MANY loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil

Amid the dust of books to find her,

Content at last, for guerdon of their toil,

With the cast mantle she hath left behind her.

Many in sad faith sought for her,

Many with crossed hands sighed for her;
But these, our brothers, fought for her.
At life's dear peril wrought for her,
So loved her that they died for her,
Tasting the raptured fleetness
Of her divine completeness:

Their higher instinct knew

Those love her best who to themselves are true,
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do;
They followed her and found her

Where all may hope to find,

Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind,

But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.

Where faith made whole with deed

Breathes its awakening breath

Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed,
With sweet, stern face unveiled,

And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

IV

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;

What is there that abides

To make the next age better for the last?
Is earth too poor to give us

Something to live for here that shall outlive us?

Some more substantial boon

Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?

The little that we see

From doubt is never free;

The little that we do

Is but half-nobly true;

With our laborious hiving

What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,

Only secure in every one's conniving,
A long account of nothings paid with loss,
Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
After our little hour of strut and rave,

With all our pasteboard passions and desires,
Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave.
But stay! no age was e'er degenerate,
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
For in our likeness still we shape our fate.

Ah, there is something here

Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer,

Something that gives our feeble light

A high immunity from Night,

Something that leaps life's narrow bars

To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;
A seed of sunshine that can leaven

Our earthy dulness with the beams of stars,
And glorify our clay

With light from fountains elder than the Day;
A conscience more divine than we,

A gladness fed with secret tears,
A vexing, forward-reaching sense
Of some more noble permanence;
A light across the sea,

Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,

Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

We have lately contrasted Poe and Holmes. And Whitman, I have already said, is of the open. Another contrast lies here, that Whitman's life-period was the same, almost to a year, as James Russell Lowell's. Walt Whitman was born on a farm in Suffolk County on Long Island. His lineage was English and Dutch. His father moved to Brooklyn when the boy was four, and young Whitman lived there until he was about seventeen. He went to public school and learned to be a printer. In 1839 he taught school and edited a paper at Huntington, his birthplace. He continued as printer, editor, and newspaper writer until 1861. Meanwhile, he brought out Leaves of Grass in 1855, the most radical experiment that had yet appeared in American poetry, both in matter and manner. He became the self-appointed spokesman of the common people and his book created discussion. It was enlarged in the next year, and again in '61. He served for three years as a volunteer army nurse in the hospitals near Washington, from '62 on. He became connected with the Department of the Interior in 1865, but the contents of his book caused his expulsion. He obtained another place in the office of the AttorneyGeneral, but, having long been in bad health, was stricken with paralysis in 1873. For ten years he then lived with his brother in Camden, N. J. After that, with the help of friends, he secured his own home in Mickle Street in the same town.

W. M. Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti the English poet, selected and edited his poems for English circulation in 1868. Whitman became well-known in England and upon the Continent. Swinburne, the great English poet, was a fervent admirer of his work. Enlarged American editions of Leaves of Grass continued to appear. Whitman also wrote Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, 1865-66, Democratic Vistas (prose), 1871, and in 1876 issued the Centennial Edition of his Works in two volumes. He lectured in New York and Boston on the anniversary of the death

In

of President Lincoln. The Attorney-General of Massachusetts suppressed the 1882 definitive edition of Leaves of Grass which appeared in Boston. It was issued later in Philadelphia. In 1883 appeared Specimen Days, a collection of Whitman's prose. 1888 appeared November Boughs, and in 1891 Good Bye, My Fancy. The 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass includes these. Whitman designed and built his own tomb in the cemetery at Camden. Walt Whitman was an elemental. His genius lay in tremendous extensive sympathy for all natural forms of life, and in expressing the brooding cosmic meaning of the song of a bird, the rustle of the sea upon the sand, the passage of the wind, the glitter of the stars. He also strove mightily to give the fullest expression to the inarticulate longings of the human heart and the human flesh. He dealt with chaotic and Protean material, he loved vastness, he loved crowds of people, he felt or declared that he felt-a great brotherly affection for everything, for things the most diverse-a sympathy that found, in the Biblical fashion, nothing common or unclean that God had cleansed with life. By many he is held to be our greatest American poet. He is certainly an enormous figure on our literary skyline, a giant toiling in a cloud.

To others his jumbling of everything together, his interminable catalogues, his frequent hoarse rant and egotistic bluster, will always prove obstacles. Walt fooled himself frequently. He appeals to impatient, rebellious, egocentric minds. But when all that is said there remains something massive and eternal about the personality of Whitman. And his sensitive sympathy, the gentle wistfulness, even, of frequent moods, is very apt to be forgotten in that barker's manner of his in front of the big tent. His detractors have usually been far lesser men than he. He was too tough and rough for the academic New Englanders.

I do not think he was "the good, gray poet." I think he was often full of the old Nick. But he let no one else manufacture his opinions for him, he set down what he observed himself. He loved the earth. He lay down and hugged it. He stuck his nose into dock-leaf and jimson-weed. He arose and orated mightily to the mountains and vociferated to the sea. He loved life as a gigantic spectacle and it was preposterous to think that he could keep silent about it. He cared nothing for artifices and habiliments.