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still better examples are to be found in his Passage to India or his Whispers of Heavenly Death, those later and lofty chants in which he was feeling his way toward the nobler, unwritten poem of man's immortal part.

There may be doubt whether Whitman has given us any adequate song of democracy. He stands for the American spirit, but not as does Franklin, Lincoln, or Lowell. If we think of all that these men did and then of what Whitman did, the difference is manifest. His office was somewhat like that of one who stands by and cheers while the procession goes on. It is true, he took a noble part through the Civil War-none nobler. But it was a humble part; he did not sit in the seats of the mighty. He saw democracy from below only, whereas Franklin and the others saw it from both below and above. Yet one positive accomplishment must be set to his credit. He became the truest laureate of the War, and of Lincoln, the idol of the people. His Drum-Taps give us the poetry of the great conflict, as his camp and hospital sketches give us the prose. Beat! Beat! Drums! and Song of the Banner at Daybreak are true poems in every sense of the word. The Memories of President Lincoln are as exalted as an elegy with such a great theme should be, yet as tender as the sincerest threnody born of personal grief. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and O Captain! My Captain! must endure with the fame of the martyr-chief."

"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather'd every rack, 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 O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead."

Whitman's own opinion of the verbal melody of his poems (the regularity of the one just quoted is altogether exceptional) has already been cited. It must not be lightly assumed, however, that there is no music in his verse. We are inclined to complain when a poem like The Vision of Sir Launfal yields less melody than its form promises; on the other hand, we are delighted to find many of Whitman's poems yielding more melody than they promise. When his theme rises and his imagination and feeling rise with it, the words flow musically enough and the rhythm answers to the emotion. to the bird song in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking :"Winds blow south, or winds blow north,

Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,

While we two keep together."

Listen

Not to feel the simple melody of this, or the larger harmony-the soothing, wave-like lapse-of other passages in the same poem, the ample sweep of the Song of the Redwood Tree, the majestic march of Pioneers! O Pioneers, the passionate pulse of Beat! Beat! Drums!-Blow! Bugles! Blow! would argue one dull of sense indeed.

But music and form are the last things Whitman would desire to have himself gauged by. He stands at the farthest remove from artist-poets like Poe, Longfellow, and Tennyson. He is more akin to Carlyle and Emerson-men of poetic insight careless about some of the minor poetic gifts. He did not write to please, but to arouse and uplift. "The true question to ask respecting a book, is, has it helped any human soul?" He explicitly declared that no one would get at his verses by viewing them as a literary performance or as sim ing mainly toward art or æstheticism.

"Camerado, this is no book,

Who touches this touches a man."

As such, therefore, the book must go down to posterity, not a perfect song, rounded, complete, and detached, but a cry, whether clear and strong or husky and broken, vibrant still with the feeling of the man who uttered it.

Here it seems well to mark the conclusion of the first national period-the creative period of our literature, though of course literature, like history itself, is continuous, and can have no real conclusion short of national extinction. From Brown and Irving to Lowell and Whitman the compass has travelled a pretty wide arc. At first timid in spirit, and bound more or less consciously to conventional, old-world forms, our literature gradually shook itself free and stood forth a native product, willing to be gauged by its inherent vitality and its unborrowed charms. It began to register faithfully, too, the various steps in our national progress-the merely material subjugation of the wilderness, the declaration of moral and intellectual independence that followed upon the declaration of political independence, the development of a worthy cisAtlantic scholarship, the encouragement of science and the scientific spirit, and the final establishment of the great modern principle of human equality. The progress was one that looked always toward making "the bounds of freedom wider yet." And with Lincoln's emancipation proclamation on the political side, and, on the literary side, the vindication by Emerson, Whitman, and others of the inviolate rights of the individual, America's part in the foremost mission of the nineteenth century seems to have been accomplished and the way cleared for new effort.

PART III

LATER ACTIVITY

FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC

1860-1900

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