We must hasten on. We have glanced at two of the forms which seem growing to literary ripeness in New York the newspaper and the popular magazine. There is only one other form whose present popularity in America is The Stage. anything like so considerable; this is the stage. So far, to be sure, the American theatre has produced no work which can claim literary consideration. During the last halfcentury, on the other hand, the American stage has developed all over the country a popularity and an organization which seem favorable to literary prospects. At the beginning of this century there were very few theatres in the United States; to-day travelling dramatic companies patrol the continent. Every town has its theatre, and every theatre its audience. Until now, to be sure, the plays most popular in America have generally come straight from Europe, and the plays made here have been apt unintelligently to follow European models. Now and again, however, there have appeared signs that various types of American character could be represented on the stage with great popular effect; and the rapid growth of the American theatre has provided us with an increasing number of skilful actors. A large though thoughtless public of theatre-goers, a school of professional actors who can intelligently present a wide variety of character, and a tendency on the part of American theatrical men to produce, amid stupidly conventional surroundings, vivid studies from life, again represent conditions of promise. If a dramatist of commanding power should arise in this country, he might find ready more than a few of the conditions from which lasting dramatic literatures have flashed into existence.

The stage, of course, though centred in New York, is

phia.

by no means limited to that city. Nor is New York the only region in the Middle States where literature has grown during the past thirty years. Philadelphia, during that Philadelperiod, has contributed to American letters several names which cannot be neglected. GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823-1890) was a dramatic poet, whose work, begun so long ago as 1847, is still worth reading. Mr. HENRY CHARLES LEA'S (1825-) works on ecclesiastical history are important and authoritative. Dr. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS'S (1833–) variorum edition of Shakspere is the most comprehensive and satisfactory setting forth which has ever been made of the plays with which he has dealt. Dr. WEIR MITCHELL (1830-) who is among the most eminent of American physicians, has produced during his later years poems and novels which would have given him fame by themselves. And Mr. OWEN WISTER'S (1860-) stories of Western life are likely to become the permanent record in literature of a passing epoch in our national life.

Every one of the writers at whom we have now glanced may perhaps prove in years to come worthy of more attention than it has been in our power, as contemporaries, to bestow. Doubtless, too, we might have touched on many more; but these would only have emphasized the truth which must long ago have forced itself upon us. This contemporary writing is too near us for confident summary. All we can surely say is that our Middle Summary. States, as they used to be called, are now dominated by New York. This town, whose domination for the moment is not only local but national, owes its predominance to that outburst of material force which throughout the victorious North followed the period of the Civil War. What may come of it no one can tell.

Hardly anything about it is as yet distinct.

There is, however, one exception. The Middle States, and to a great degree the city of New York itself, produced one eccentric literary figure, who has emerged into an isolation sometimes believed eminent. This is Walt Whitman.

II

WALT WHITMAN

REFERENCES

WORKS: Leaves of Grass, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; Complete Prose Works, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; Complete Writings, Camden Edition, 10 vols., New York: Putnam, 1902.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: John Burroughs, Whitman (Vol. X of Burroughs's Works, Riverside Edition, Boston: Houghton, 1896); Stedman, Poets of America, chap. x; *R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books; *William Clarke, Walt Whitman, New York: Macmillan, 1892; *H. L. Traubel and others, In re Walt Whitman, Philadelphia: McKay, 1893.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 307-310.

SELECTIONS: *Carpenter, 389-402; Griswold, Poets, 626-627; Stedman, 221-232; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VII, 501-513.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) was almost exactly contemporary with Lowell. No two lives could have been much more different. Lowell, the son of a minister, closely related to the best people of New England, lived amid the Life. gentlest academic and social influences in America. Whitman was the son of a carpenter and builder on the outskirts of Brooklyn; the only New England man of letters equally humble in origin was Whittier.

The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, is almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. Whittier, the child of a Quaker farmer in the Yankee country, grew up and lived almost all his life amid guileless influences Whitman, born of the artisan class in a region close to the largest and most corrupt centre of popula

Writings.

tion on his native continent, had a rather vagrant youth and manhood. At times he was a printer, at times a school-master, at times editor of stray country newspapers, and by and by he took up his father's trade of carpenter and builder. Meanwhile he had rambled about the country and into Canada; but in general until past thirty years old, he was apt to be near the East River. The New York thus familiar to him was passing, in the last days of the Knickerbocker School, into its metropolitan existence. The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, the year which produced the Knickerbocker Gallery.

During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army nurse. After the war, until 1873, he held some small Government clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a paralytic stroke brought his active life to an end; for his last twenty years he lived an invalid at Camden, New Jersey.

Until 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his own hands, Whitman had not declared himself as a man of letters. From that time to the end he was constantly publishing verse, which from time to time he collected in increasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, some stray volumes of prose,-Democratic Vistas (1871), Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), and the like. Prose and poetry alike seem full of a conviction that he had a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democracy, which he believed characteristic of his country. Few men have ever cherished a purpose more literally popular. Yet it is doubtful whether any man of letters in this country ever appealed less to the masses.

Beyond question Whitman had remarkable individuality