the manly republican character of his father, the spiritual intuition of his mother, the spirit of peace which brooded like a dove over the simple Quaker homestead-these made him also the friend of man and the poet of the soul.

But Whitman was to go through wider and more complicated experiences than these, or he could not have become Democracy's chosen bard. He was to become printer and journalist, to go freely, as he expresses it, with "powerful, uneducated persons," to sound all the depths of life, good and bad, in a great city, to live day by day with dead and dying in vast army hospitals, to serve the Government as an official, to wander over vast regions of his own vast continent, to discover what the great world is. "He made himself familiar," writes Dr. Bucke, "with all kinds of employments, not by reading trade reports and statistics, but by watching and stopping hours with the workmen (often his intimate friends) at their work. He visited the foundries, shops, rolling mills, slaughterhouses, woollen and cotton factories, shipyards, wharves, and the big carriage and cabinet shopswent to clam-bakes, races, auctions, weddings, sailing and bathing parties, christenings, and all kinds of merry-makings."1 He knew every New York omnibus-driver, and found them both good comrades and capital materials for study. Indeed, he tells us that the influence of these rough, good-hearted fellows (like the Broadway stage-driver in To Think of Time)

1 Walt Whitman, by R. M. Bucke, M.D.

1

"undoubtedly entered into the gestation of Leaves of Grass." No scene of natural beauty, no "appletree blows of white and pink in the orchard," no lilac-bush "with every leaf a miracle," no "gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air," no "hurrying-tumbling waves," no "healthy uplands with herby-perfumed breezes" give him greater inspiration than the thronged streets of New York, with the "interminable eyes," with the life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, the saloon of the steamer, the crowded excursion, "Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus," the rushing torrent, the never-ceasing roar of modern human life.

He absorbs the influences coming from a gang of stevedores or a crowd of young men from a printingoffice as he does these of "the splendid silent sun," so that he can say with truth

"I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despis'd riches;

'I have given alms to every one that ask'd, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labour to others,

Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown,

Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young, and with the mothers of families, Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees, stars, rivers," etc.2

1 Specimen Days and Collects, p. 19.

2 "By Blue Ontario's Shore." Leaves of Grass, p. 273.

A hopeless subject this for "city" men, most clergymen, British matrons, organisers of "charity," and all persons who live by routine, and convention, and who survey life from the inside of a counting-house or a stuccoed villa. A great contrast, too, to our literary men, or at least to the majority of them. For literature, in Whitman's eyes, is once more vitally associated with life, as it was in the days of the Elizabethan dramatists, of the buoyant Cervantes, of the majestic Dante. It is not a profession, a separate calling, an affair of libraries and literary coteries, but a transcript from actual contemporary life. It has been supposed that Whitman carried this to the extreme limit of coarseness, and that he has been purposely, and (as it were) almost artificially rude in his contempt of conventions. This is not, however, the case. His manners and breeding have been admitted by all who were privileged to know him, to be simple, unaffected, natural, and gentle. His bearing as man and as author is frankly democratic. He does not breathe any hatred or contempt of those who live in greater luxury; he simply prefers his own simple way. Scarce a single English contemporary man of letters appears to have thoroughly assimilated this democratic spirit, unless we except our noble artist-poet, William Morris, printing, designing, testing colours and patterns with his own hands, and speaking to the masses at out-of-door gatherings; and perhaps in a lesser degree, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his sylvan retreat in Samoa. In other countries Tolstoi's life is most closely analogous to that of Whitman.

The result of this isolation of our chief writers from actual popular life is unquestionably loss of influence. It may reasonably be suspected whether the popularity of Tennyson's exquisite poetry is much more than middle-class popularity. The average trade unionist probably would somewhat resent Tennyson's attitude to his class were he acquainted with the Laureate's verse. Browning has vigorous popular sympathies, but, with a few exceptional poems, his subtle thought carries him far beyond the slow mind of the British artisan. Arnold's pensive muse attracts only the cultured few. Swinburne's democratic instincts are. not much more than skin-deep; indeed his is the aristocratic Pagan republicanism of his powerful master and inspirer, Landor. Spite of the superficially reactionary character of a portion of Wordsworth's poetry, his human instincts are so true, so deep, that we may accept, as Mr. Arnold does, Wordsworth's own verdict concerning his poems: "They will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, and will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." And Wordsworth had not only communed with the spirit of Nature, but had known love "in huts where poor men lie." But on the whole the peasant-poet, Burns, born of the people and living among them all his life, is still the British democratic bard.

"Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives."

And that mighty influence of the Ayrshire plough

man is surely due to the fact that with him, as with Whitman, literature is not a thing apart, but a transcript of actual daily life; like the Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress, Homer, Don Quixote, and those verses of Tasso which the Venetian gondoliers used to sing.

"Out from the heart of Nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old."

Whitman's personal appearance is thus described by Thomas A. Gere, an employé of an East River steamboat, who was one of the poet's friends, and who, writing in 1882, paints his hero as he appeared in the years from 1854 to 1860: "Walt's appearance used to attract great attention from the passengers when he came on board the boat. He was quite six feet in height, with the frame of a gladiator, a flowing gray beard mingled with the hairs on his broad, slightly bared chest. In his well-laundried checked shirtsleeves, with trousers frequently pushed into his bootlegs, his fine head covered with an immense slouched black or light felt hat, he would walk about with a naturally majestic stride, a massive model of ease and independence. I hardly think his style of dress in those days was meant to be eccentric; he was very antagonistic to all show or sham, and I fancy he mercly attired himself in what was handy, clean, economical, and comfortable." 1 In Mr. W. D. O'Connor's powerful, albeit too florid "Vindication " of "The Good Gray Poet," dated Washington, 2nd September, 1865, when Whitman was forty-six years

1 Walt Whitman, by R. M. Bucke, M.D., p. 33.