A Leaf of Grass From Shady Hill: With a Review of Walt Whitman's <i>Leaves Of Grass</i> [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674183377, 9780674334656

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A LEAF OF GRASS FROM SHADY HILL.

This volume is printed for the John Barnard Associates, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of C H A R L E S E L I O T NORTON 1827-1927.

C. E. NORTON AND F.

CHILD ABOUT 1854

With

WALT

a review

WHITMAN'S

Written

CHARLES

of

by

ITIilOT NORTON

in XS^ai.

Copyright, 1928, B y KENNETH Β .

MUBDOCK.

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U . S . A .

Preface

T

HIS little book, printed to commemorate the centenary of the

birth of Charles Eliot Norton, contains a poem by him, inspired

by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and also his review of that work,

printed anonymously in Putnam's Monthly for September, 1855. The introductory essay gives the evidence for ascribing both the poem and the review to Norton, together with a few notes on his attitude toward Whitman in 1855 and thereafter. The frontispiece is from a daguerreotype, in the possession of Professor Norton's family, of Norton and Francis James Child, taken about 1854. I t was reproduced in 1913 for the first volume of "Letters of Charles Eliot Norton," published by Houghton Mifflin Company, which has very kindly printed this frontispiece for the present publication, from the original plate. The Associates gratefully acknowledge their appreciation of this courtesy. The original manuscript of the poem, Norton's marked copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, his annotated list of contributors to Putnam's, his letter to Lowell about Whitman, and Lowell's answer, are all in the Harvard College Library. They have been made available by the generous permission of its officers. T o them; to Mr. Winship, whose recognition of the interest and importance of the manuscript poem made this book possible and whose assistance greatly lightened the editor's task; and to Mr. C. J. Furness, who has contributed helpful information and comment, the John Barnard Associates express their hearty thanks.

A L E A F OF G R A S S FROM S H A D Y HILL. AN EXPLANATORY ESSAY BY

KENNETH BALLARD MURDOCK.

A Leaf of Grass from Shady Hill R O M Shady Hill in Cambridge to Rome's printing shop at the corner of Cranberry and Fulton Streets in Brooklyn was, in 1855, a long journey, spiritually as well as physically. Between Charles Eliot Norton, as he has crystallized in text-books, and Walt Whitman, pilloried on a pedestal by the cultists, lies, if legend is to be believed, a gulf unspanned by sympathy. The critic, the lover of the Old World, the contemner of much in democratic America, is pictured as too close to Boston to unbend far toward the inspired "loafer" of Brooklyn, shouting his defiance of literary orthodoxy in the teeth of the conservative, exalting America in the rough, and glorifying the standards of the crowd. Of course Norton's Cambridge and Whitman's New York often were oil and water. If Whitman's own family found Hiawatha and Leaves of Grass alike dubious as poetry, most Bostoniane worshipped placidly at Longfellow's shrine and made no attempt to hear Whitman's proclamation of his message. But literary history has a way of wrapping kernels of fact in husks of exaggeration and has not hesitated now and then to arraign all Bostonians, Cantabrigians — even all New Englanders save a few at Concord — as stoically indifferent to Whitman's assault on their critical defences. And, with a logic not quite obvious, this has been twisted into an argument for the poetic greatness of the "magnificent idler." It may therefore savor of disparagement of him to suggest that whatever barriers there may have been between Cambridge and Brooklyn in 1855, whatever the differences between Whitman and, say, Whittier (who is said to have been improvident enough to throw his copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass into the fire), whatever the unlikelihood that a New Englander of New Englanders, a college professor in embryo, should

10

Norton and Whitman.

have relished the "barbaric yawp," one such New Englander and prospective academic — Charles Eliot Norton — did welcome Leaves of Grass. He reviewed it more enthusiastically and more justly than most of the baffled critics. More than that, he offered it the sincerest of flattery by trying his own hand at the "loose-fingered chords" loved of Whitman. Soberly seen, the tale of the reception of the slim quarto of 1855 at Shady Hill does credit both to its author and to Norton, who, although he looked out upon America from the self-sufficient world of Cambridge, caught the note of strength in a voice speaking from afar. How Leaves of Grass was printed in 1855 without publisher's imprint; how but few of the edition were sold; how, of the presentation copies sent to the literati, many were rejected or ignored; how Emerson on July 21 wrote his famous letter calling the book "the most "extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet con"tributed"—these are historical commonplaces. As to the reviewers, opinions differ. "Obscure young men like Thoreau and Burroughs "were," according to Mr. Boynton, "moved to early admiration, but " their opinion counted for nothing with the multitude. Emerson was "the single man of influence to 'greet [Whitman] at the beginning of "'a great career.' The larger public paid no attention to him; the "smaller, artistic public did what they always do to a defiantly indep e n d e n t artist." Or, to quote Katharine Lee Bates: "The American " public, so far as it heeded" Whitman "at all, was affronted, and with "right good reason. Hitherto its poets, Harvard professors, Concord " sages, graceful Southerners, polished Philadelphians and New York"ers, had written like the pure-hearted, cultivated gentlemen they "were." Professor Trent is more extreme: "The reviewers saw only "the new, the bizarre, the egoistic, the blatant, the grotesque, the "hazardous elements of the book, and they damned Whitman incon"tinently"; and a German critic boils it all down to one sentence, "Emerson alone recognized the merit of the poems."

Norton and Whitman.

11

But Emerson was not alone, nor was his opinion shared, in part at least, only by the "obscure young men," Thoreau, Burroughs, and, it may now be added, Norton. Edward Everett Hale in the North American Review for January, 1856, found far more to praise than to blame in Leaves of Grass. Actually the reviews of the 1855 edition were "as divergent as possible." Mr. Perry calls attention to some, in the New York Criterion, the London Critic, and the Intelligencer, Post, and Christian Examiner, all of Boston, which were "utterly denunciatory." But Putnam's Monthly of New York, certainly one of the most influential American critical journals in 1855, called by E. C. Stedman "the leading magazine," printed in September a review of Leaves of Grass which "gave the strange book the best reception possible." It pointed out what seemed then, and perhaps still seem, the defects of the poems, but dilated more upon Whitman's power than his grossness, emphasizing rather the virtues of the book than the fact that like other books it was not perfect. Moreover, the reviewer quoted (somewhat inaccurately) many extracts to illustrate the merits of the volume. Seek as one may in other periodicals and newspapers of the time, there seems to have been no criticism — not even Whitman's own — more just or better calculated to spread discerning appreciation of Leaves of Grass. The review from Putnam's is reprinted now, appearing for the first time as the work of Charles Eliot Norton. That he wrote it is plain, the moment the pieces of a not very complicated puzzle are fitted together. One is Norton's copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Another is a printed list of contributors to the first five volumes of Putnam's, on which Norton has made manuscript notations. Finally, there is a letter from Norton to Lowell on September 23, 1855, in which he tells the older critic of his interest in Whitman. He says: "A new book called Leaves of Grass has just come "out which is worth knowing about. . . . Its author according to his "own account is 'Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos.' It is "a book which has excited Emerson's enthusiasm. He has written a

12

Norton and Whitman.

"letter to this 'one of the roughs' which I have seen, expressing the "warmest admiration & encouragement. It is no wonder that he likes "it, for Walt Whitman has read the Dial & Nature, and combines the "characteristics of a Concord philosopher with those of a New York " fireman. There is little original thought but much original expression "in it. There are some passages of most vigorous & vivid writing, "some superbly graphic descriptions; great stretches of imagination, " — and then, passages of intolerable coarseness, — not gross & licentious, but simply disgustingly coarse. The book is such indeed that "one cannot leave it about for chance readers, and would be sorry to "know that any woman had looked into it past the title-page. I have "got a copy for you, for there are things in it that you will admire." This echoes a few sentences of the review in Putnam's: "The poems " . . . may briefly be described as a compound of the New England " transcendentalist and New York rowdy. A fireman or omnibus "driver, who had intelligence enough to absorb the speculations of that "school of thought which culminated at Boston some fifteen or eighte e n years a g o , . . . might have written this . . . book." The agreement is too exact to be accidental, nor is it necessary to suppose that Norton had to borrow phrases in order to tell Lowell what he thought. In his copy of the list of contributors to Putnam''s he has written "C. E. Norton" opposite the title of "St. Nicholas and Five Points," printed anonymously in May, 1853. In the same list he is designated as the author of "The Palankeen," published without his name in June, 1854. Opposite the title "Peschierra," he has inserted "A. H. Clough," and in a letter to Clough, dated May 2,1854, he said: "This 'Putnam' too "has your 'Peschiera,' — and as you know how much I liked it, I will "only say that it is as good in print as it was in MS. You have sent "the poems for the volume before this I hope. If you do not see 'Putn a m , ' write to me that I may send it to you." In other words, Norton had by 1855 contributed to Putnam's Monthly at least two bits of prose (neither, by the way, noted in the bibliography appended to his

Norton and Whitman.

13

printed letters), and it was probably through him that Clough's Peschiera found its way into the pages of that periodical. Norton must have been known in the office of Putnam's, where his friend, G. W. Curtis, occupied an editorial chair, and he must have seemed an obvious person to ask to review a chance volume of poetry. Finally, in his copy of the first Leaves of Grass he has written "Charles E . Norton. 1855," and in its margins are faint pencillings opposite certain lines. Sometimes an " x " is set at the beginning of some section of the poem; sometimes a vertical line is drawn to indicate a special passage. Now the review in Putnam's contains one extract from Whitman's preface and nine from the poems themselves. Of the latter, two are marked in Norton's copy of Leaves of Grass by vertical rulings; a third, of but one line, is noted by an " x " ; two other longer passages have " x ' s " opposite their first lines; a sixth is, except for the first few lines, marked by a vertical pencil stroke in the margin; a seventh, of eight lines, has the last four similarly picked out, and but two of the selections printed in the review were not marked at all by Norton. In all, he put marginal sign-posts opposite twenty-three excerpts from the poems, and seven of these were included in the review. These bits of fact, fitted together, point to the obvious conclusion that the editors of Putnam's Magazine, receiving Leaves of Grass for review, sent it to Charles Eliot Norton in Cambridge, who read it, was impressed, and marked the lines he liked most. Then, it seems, he wrote his review and, discovering that he could not put in it all his chosen passages, selected seven of them, adding two others which, as he glanced again at the large pages of Whitman's challenging volume, struck him with a force he had not felt at first. When the review was already in print, he wrote to Lowell, quite naturally repeating its ideas and to some extent its wording and arrangement. I t is at least interesting to add a review, and an important one of an important book, to the list of Norton's writings; it is as interesting to discover that not one but two of the comparatively few favorable

14

Norton and Whitman.

criticisms of the first edition of Leaves of Grass came out of New England. Historical rumor has it that the northeastern states seventyfive years ago were not given to welcoming literary outsiders. Poe's fulminations against New England and its North American Review are memorably forceful, and one of his loyal biographers asserts that the "New England group" were given to "clannish log-rolling" and to "the assumption of the superiority of the New England brand of cult u r e and virtue." Perhaps, but even if it were true that from Poe "the Puritan has withdrawn the fringes of his robes lest they take "stain from the contact," it would still be true that there was in 1855 a Puritan or two not afraid of Whitman, who might be expected to be to the "New England group" more terrifying than Poe. Such a one was Charles Eliot Norton. His comments on Leaves of Grass were more cordial than those of other Bostoniane and Cantabrigians, save Hale, and such faults as he saw have been detected since by others who are neither Puritans nor New Englanders. Inherited prejudices to the contrary, local affiliations notwithstanding, he spoke his mind about Whitman, siding less closely with Longfellow, who went his tranquil way apparently unimpressed and undisturbed, than with Emerson, who hailed Whitman with frank delight. It all raises fascinating fields for speculation. What would Charles Eliot Norton's father, the outspoken Andrews Norton, have thought of the affair? What would he have said of Leaves of Grass — he who had written: I love the quiet midnight hour, When Care and Hope and Passion sleep, And Reason with untroubled power Can her late vigils duly keep—?

What would he have felt in seeing his son for the moment in a halfway critical alliance with Emerson, whom he, Andrews Norton, had celebrated not many years before as an infidel of sorts? Would he have wished.that Charles had chosen to adopt Longfellow's attitude? And what, to ask the most alluringly unanswerable question of all,

Norton and Whitman.

15

would have been the response of Andrews* Norton to the news that his son was not only reading Walt Whitman's "amorphous verse" but scribbling diligently on a no less amorphous poem of his own? For Charles Eliot Norton did write such a poem, possibly as a kind of safety-valve for the enthusiasm he had derived from Leaves of Grass. The result, now printed, seems never to have been published before. Perhaps it was not meant to have an audience. Or, since it begins: " I will pluck a leaf of grass & give it to you to look at," perhaps it was written for someone to whom Notton gave Whitman's book. Could it have been for Lowell, for whom Norton did get a copy of Leaves of Grass? If so, did Lowell ever see the poem, or was its author discouraged by his older friend's lukewarm reception of his letter of September 23? Replying on October 12, Lowell wrote: " I thank you for having thought of me in the copy of Whitman's "book. I remember him of old — he used to write for the Democratic "Review. . . . No, no, the kind of thing you describe won't do. When " a man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously un" original, a want of self-respect which does not often go along with the "capacity for great things. The great fellows have always let the " stream of their activity flow quietly — if one splashes in it he may "make a sparkle, but he muddies it too, & the good folks down below " (I mean posterity) will have none of it." This was a cooling draught for enthusiasm; small wonder if Norton's bit of Whitmanic verse, even if designed for Lowell, was left unsent. It seems not to have been noticed by anyone until Mr. Winship in 1927 recognized it, neatly pasted in the front of Norton's copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. There is no way of telling when it was written, but it is reasonable to suppose that it was soon after Norton first read Whitman. That Norton wrote it is clear, not only because the manuscript is in his autograph, but because there are various corrections and alterations which could hardly be explained if it were assumed to be simply a copy of an effort by someone else.

16

Norton and Whitman.

Indeed, the corrections and alternate readings tell the whole story. They show that the poem was Norton's, and since no man troubles to do much revision of a poem which he regards merely as an idle essay in imitation, they make it plain that "I will pluck a leaf of grass" was deliberate and serious in execution and intention. The poem as it is printed here gives only what may be guessed to be the final version. Wherever one word has been crossed out and another substituted, only the second is printed; where Norton has written in above the line a suggested variant reading but has not cancelled the original, the latter has been kept, as the one which was written first and, in spite of second thoughts, retained. But to neglect the deleted or altered words and phrases would be to ignore one of the most interesting features of the manuscript: the light it sheds on the painstaking concern which Charles Eliot Norton brought to his experiment in Whitmanic measures. In the second line he wavered between "woven" and "made," and left both, and instead of "the still starlighted night" had at first simply "the night." Here, at least, he was on the right track in his revising. In the fifth line, "displayed" has disappeared from "In it is the order of all things displayed"; in the tenth, "Even now the life which ran through this spire of grass" struck Norton as unfinished. He tried "spire of dry grass," but after writing above the line the first letter of the added adjective, he saw a better place for it, and "this dry spire of grass" was the final phrasing. "Retreated to "burst into fuller life" has become in the next line "Retreated to " burst into fuller existence " ; in the twelfth, " white mould " is changed to "gray mould," and the fifteenth, originally written as "I mark him "not but I feel a sharp prick in my foot," was cut down to its last eight words. "Dot" in the next line was substituted for a word, perhaps "bite," now indecipherable. Norton then could not choose between "And out of it passes my soul" and "out of that hole passes my "soul," and left both readings. The first was the original, and the sudden rhyme in the second is reason enough to reject it. Also in the

Norton and Whitman.

17

eighteenth line he changed "the presence of death" to "the grip & "presence of death," and then deleted "presence" but neglected " &, " so that the manuscript actually reads, "the grip & of death," though "the grip of death" was evidently intended. "Lifeless" in the next line disappears from the phrase, "Death has a lifeless poor worthless "thing." This is followed at once by, "And I rejoice in the freedom "from life in which men fear death," though the first draft read, "And I rejoice to be free from the life in which men fear death." The only other correction is in the next to the last line where "body" has become "carcass" — a change more significant than it at first appears. Taken together, the alterations show that Norton, occupied with some deeper motive than a mere passing whim for imitation, understood better than some later critics that back of Whitman's " formlessness," back of his disregard for the usual mechanics of verse, lay a sure appreciation of the effect he sought and a definite, if unformulated, ideal of musical structure. The poem as a whole speaks for itself. It is not Whitman, for all its emulation of Whitman's method. It is Shady Hill, not Paumanok; Cambridge, Harvard, and the Dante Society, not Manhattan and the fraternity of "Camerados." To be sure, it. conscientiously brings in "the boy in the mine, cold, dirty, hardworked, low browed, cruel & "mean," and it deals with death and immortality, themes often touched by Whitman. But by him the separation of soul and body in death was usually less clearly visioned than in Norton's I look down with disdain on the poor flattened carcass And laugh for death did not flatten my soul.

This agrees badly with Whitman's Was somebody asking to see the soul? See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands . . . Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern and includes and is the soul,

18

Norton and Whitman.

or his no less characteristic pronouncement, I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul.

Norton was thinking of the soul as immortal, of death as its release from the body; Whitman was striving to write of body, soul, and universe as one and indissoluble. Perhaps there is a clue here to the date of the poem, for not long after 1855 Charles Eliot Norton was uncertain about immortality, saying, "This life is all." But in 1855, fresh from editing A Book of Hymns for Young Persons, he might easily have applied Whitman's method to a poem on the old familiar conception of duality of soul and body, and of death as the spirit's emancipation from the flesh, its joyous escape "from the life in which men fear death." He was perhaps closer to his father's But who the destined hour may tell That bids the loosened spirit fly?

or to his colonial ancestress's With angel's wings thy soul shall mount To bliss unseen by eye,

than to Whitman. After 1855 there is little to link Whitman and Norton. Their paths diverged, they won fame in different audiences. What one thought of the other in 1900 he put explicitly in a letter to Miss E. P. Gould, thanking her for her Gems from Walt Whitman. "They," said Norton, "like the complete works of the poet, constantly awaken the regret " t h a t his literary taste and his critical faculty were not developed in "equal measure with his poetic genius and his imaginative insight." If this represents a decline in enthusiasm it is no more pronounced than Emerson's, who followed his letter to Whitman in 1855 by one to Carlyle in the next year, in which he said: "One book, last summer, " came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible "eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American, — which " I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to

Norton and Whitman.

19

" whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. "Yet I believe now again, I shall. I t is called Leaves of Grass, — was "written and printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New "York, named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if "you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a " warehouse, you can light your pipe with it." This letter, when it was printed, annoyed W. D. O'Connor, who wrote to Whitman that he was suspicious of "Professor Norton" as an editor of Emerson's letters to Carlyle, saying, " I hope he would not suppress things favorable to "you, but have little faith in him since I read a sketch of his lecture on " Greek art in which he held that the later Greek sculpture began to be "indecent with nudity — the great or earlier Greek being always "draped." Some years later Whitman commented on this, and on O'Connor's evidence in rebuttal of Norton's view of the decency of early Greek art, declaring, "He throws Norton clean off his horse into "the mud. Norton is the type of scholar who is bound to distrust a "man like me." Perhaps had Whitman known of the manuscript of " I will pluck a leaf of grass," or of the authorship of the review in Putnam's Monthly in 1855, he might have rephrased his remark. Such scanty evidence on the later attitude of Norton and Whitman toward each other is the most explicit we have, though it is remembered that when the latter lectured in New York in 1887, Charles Eliot Norton sat conspicuously in a box. The lecturer's summing up of the occasion in his "Everybody friendly" may be assumed to have included even savants from Cambridge. In the same year some of Whitman's Boston friends proposed to build a summer home for him at Timber Creek, New Jersey, and Norton contributed to the fund. But such gleanings of fact show only that the Cambridge scholar was kindly toward a fellow-writer. If there were nothing else, Norton might be consistently thought of as a coolly detached observer, patronizingly content to hear Whitman lecture but quite untouched by the fervor that made the poet his disciples. Untouched he was, no

20

Norton and Whitman.

doubt, in 1887 or 1900, but in 1855? Even as he listened to Whitman in New York, he may have remembered how thirty-two years before he had been one of the few reviewers to do something like justice to the power of the "Good Gray Poet." And he can hardly have forgotten, however aloof he chose to appear in 1887, that in a manuscript at Shady Hill was proof that he, Charles Eliot Norton, had once paid to Walt W7hitman and his "singing in the West" a tribute worthy of the most ardent worshipper at his shrine. Κ. Β. M. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

April 16, 1928.

A LEAF OF GRASS. W R I T T E N BY

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

Now Printed for the First Time from the Original Manuscript in the Norton Collection of the Harvard College Library.

A Leaf of Grass. I will pluck a leaf of grass & give it to you to look at. It is made of sunshine & rain, of the dew of the evening and of the cool air of the still starlighted night, It springs from the earth fresh as the first blade that tinged the brown soil with green When the world was young, and each day a new miracle to eyes not blinded with the dust of accustomedness. In it is the order of all things, in the narrow stem is enclosed the mystery of life & of death. Its slender flag is the banner on which the names of God are inscribed. Here is a leaf dry & dead as we call it; brown, wasted & rattling against its dry next neighbour in the wind, This is the valley of dry bones, and here all the dead lie in order. But who knows what it is to die, and he who dies does he know what it is to be dead? Even now the life which ran through this dry spire of grass is not dead but has only hidden itself & retreated, Retreated to burst into fuller existence somewhere else in the boundless Creation. I walk in the wood, underneath my feet are the crackling curiously decaying limbs soft with gray mould, & slimy with dampness. I step secure and mind not the snake that lies sunning himself hidden under a log. He hears me coming, and with red eye sees that he cannot escape. I feel a sharp prick in my foot. There is a small red dot, a pin's point would make a larger, But in at that hole, that little insignificant hole comes death, And out of it passes my soul. My soul needs no large door to escape from the grip of death. Death has a poor worthless thing, the burden & waste of my soul And I rejoice in the freedom from life in which men fear death.

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A Leaf of Grass.

For now look at the boy in the mine, cold, dirty, hardworked, low browed, cruel & mean. He strikes one false blow, the mine caves, he is dead, and do you think he is sorry? I go to a factory; the whirling wheels, the noise & jar of the spindles, the rush of the steam make me proud of myself And I think all this I have made with my head & my hands. A band that I see not catches the skirt of my coat, The cloth will not yield, and 1 am pulled in between rollers & come out flat & what is called dead, But I look down with disdain on the poor flattened carcass And laugh for death did not flatten my soul.

A REVIEW OF WALT WHITMAN'S

LEAVES OF GRASS. (BY CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.)

Reprinted from Putnam's New York, September,

Monthly, 1855.

Whitman's Leaves of Grass U R account of the last month's literature would be incomplete without some notice of a curious and lawless collection of poems, called Leaves of Grass, and issued in a thin quarto without the name of publisher or author. The poems, twelve in number, are neither in rhyme nor blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity, and, as many readers will perhaps think, without any idea of sense or reason. The writer's scorn for the wonted usages of good writing extends to the vocabulary he adopts; words usually banished from polite society are here employed without reserve and with perfect indifference to their effect on the reader's mind; and not only is the book one not to be read aloud to a mixed audience, but the introduction of terms never before heard or seen, and of slang expressions, often renders an otherwise striking passage altogether laughable. But, as the writer is a new light in poetry, it is only fair to let him state his theory for himself. We extract from the preface: — The art of art, the glory of expression, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity, and the sunlight of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity •—• nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness. . . . To speak in literature, with the perfect rectitude and the insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods, is the flawless triumph of art. . . . The greatest poet has less a marked style, and is more the channel of thought and things, without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance, or effect, or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest, like curtains. What I feel, I feel for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt, or startle, or fascinate, or soothe, I will have purposes, as health, or heat, or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side to look in the mirror with me.

The application of these principles, and of many others equally peculiar, which are expounded in a style equally oracular throughout

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Norton and Whitman.

the long preface, — is made passim, and often with comical success, in the poems themselves, which may briefly be described as a compound of the New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy. A fireman or omnibus driver, who had intelligence enough to absorb the speculations of that school of thought which culminated at Boston some fifteen or eighteen years ago, and resources of expression to put them forth again in a form of his own, with sufficient self-conceit and contempt for public taste to affront all usual propriety of diction, might have written this gross yet elevated, this superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet somehow fascinating book. As we say, it is a mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism, and, what must be surprising to both these elements, they here seem to fuse and combine with the most perfect harmony. The vast and vague conceptions of the one, lose nothing of their quality in passing through the coarse and odd intellectual medium of the other; while there is an original perception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic directness in our new poet, which belong to no other adept of the transcendental school. But we have no intention of regularly criticising this very irregular production; our aim is rather to cull, from the rough and ragged thicket of its pages, a few passages equally remarkable in point of thought and expression. Of course we do not select those which are the most transcendental or the most bold: — I play not a march for victors only. . . . I play great marches for conquered and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall . . . battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I sound triumphal drums for the dead . . . I fling through my embouchures the loudest and gayest music to them —Vivas to those who have failed, and to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea, and to those themselves who sank in the sea. And to all generals that lost engagements, and to all overcome heroes, and the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known. I am the mashed fireman, with breast-bone broken . . . tumbling walls buried me in their débris — Heat and smoke, I respired . . . I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades —

Norton and Whitman.

29

I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels. They have cleared the beams away . . . they tenderly lift me forth. I lie in the night air in my red shirt . . . the pervading hush is for my sake. Painless after all I lie, exhausted, but not so unhappy. White and beautiful are the faces around me . . . the heads are bared of their firecaps — The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. I tell not the fall of Alamo . . . not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo : The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo. They were the glory of the race of rangers, Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a supper, or a courtship : Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud and affectionate — Bearded, sun-burnt, dressed in the free costume of hunters. Did you read in the books of the old-fashioned frigate fight? Did you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? Our foe was no skulk in his ship, I tell you, His was the English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be : Along the lowered eve he came, terribly raking us. We close with him: the yards entangled . . . the masts touched: My captain lashed fast with his own hands. We had received some eighteen-pound shots under the water — On our lower gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up, overhead. Ten o'clock at night and the full moon shining, and the leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported; The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners in the after-hold, to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine was now stopped by the sentinels — They saw so many strange faces, they did not know whom to trust. Our frigate was a-fire — the other asked if we demanded quarters? if our colors were struck and the fighting done? I laughed content when I heard the voice of my little captain — " W e have not struck," he composedly cried. " W e have just begun our part of the fighting." Only three guns were in use. One was directed by the captain himself, against the enemy's mainmast : Two, well served with grape and canister, silenced his musketry and cleared his decks. Not a moment's cease — The leaks gained fast on the pumps . . . the fire eat toward the powder magazine : One of the pumps was shot away; it was generally thought we were sinking.

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Norton and Whitman.

Serene stood the little captain: He was not hurried . . . his voice was neither high nor low — His eyes gave more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve at night, there in the beams of the moon, they surrendered to us. As to you, life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths : No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven — O suns ! O grave of graves ! O perpetual transfers and promotions, if you do not say anything, how can I say anything, Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest — Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight? Toss, sparkles of day and dusk — toss on the black stems that decay in the muck —Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs ! A slave at auction ! I help the auctioneer . . . the sloven does not half know his business. Gentlemen, look on this curious creature: Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for him — For him, the globe lay preparing quintillions of years, without one animal or plant — For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled : In that head, the all-baffling brain — In it, and below it, the waking of heroes. Examine these limbs, red, black or white . . . they are very cunning in tendon and nerve; They shall be stript, that you may see them. *

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Within there runs his blood . . . the same old blood . . . the same red-running blood — There, swells and jets his heart . . . there all passions and desires . . . all Teachings and aspirations; Do you think they are not there, because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture rooms? This is not only one man . . . he is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns : In him the start of populous states and rich republics; Of him, countless immortal lives, with countless embodiments and enjoyments. How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring, through the centuries? A woman at auction! She, too, is not only herself . . . she is the teeming mother of mothers : She is the bearer of them who shall grow and be mates to the mothers. Her daughters, or their daughters' daughters . . . who knows who shall mate with them? Who knows, through the centuries, what heroes may come from them?

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In them, and of them, natal love . . . in them the divine mystery . . . the same old, beautiful mystery. Behold a woman ! She looks out from her Quaker cap . . . her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky, She sits in an arm-chair, under the shaded porch of the farm house — The sun just shines on her old white head. Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen : Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters spun it with the distaff and the wheel. The melodious character of the earth! The finish, beyond which philosophy cannot go, and does not wish to go ! The justified mother of men ! Old age superbly rising! Ineffable grace of dying days. Day, full-blown and splendid . . . day of the immense sun, and action, and ambition, and laughter: The night follows close, with millions of suns, and sleep, and restoring darkness.

As seems very proper in a book of transcendental poetry, the author withholds his name from the title page, and presents his portrait, neatly engraved on steel, instead. This, no doubt, is upon the principle that the name is merely accidental; while the portrait affords an idea of the essential being from whom these utterances proceed. We must add, however, that this significant reticence does not prevail throughout the volume, for we learn on p. 29, that our poet is "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos." That he was an American, we knew before, for, aside from America, there is no quarter of the universe where such a production could have had a genesis. That he was one of the roughs was also tolerably plain; but that he was a kosmos, is a piece of news we were hardly prepared for. Precisely what a kosmos is, we trust Mr. Whitman will take an early occasion to inform the impatient public.