Take my leaves, America! Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring. Surround them, East and West! He glories in the heroic deeds of America, the sea fight of John Paul Jones, the defense of the Alamo, and his characterization of the various sections of the land thrills one and exhilarates one like a glimpse of the flag. What a spread, continent-wide, free-aired and vast--"Far breath'd land, Arctic braced! Mexican breezed!"--one gets in the crescendo beginning: O the lands! Lands scorning invaders! Interlinked, food-yielding lands! It is the first _all_ American thrill in our literature. The new literary form adopted by Whitman was not a deliberate and studied revolt from the conventional forms of the times: it was rather a discovery of Walt Whitman by himself. Style is the man: the "easily written, loose-fingered chords" of his chant, unrimed, lawless; this was Whitman himself. How he found it or when he found it, matters not greatly. It is possible that he got a hint from his reading of Ossian or of the Bible or of Eastern literature, but we know that at the end it came spontaneously. He was too indolent to elaborate for himself a deliberate metrical system, he was too lawless of soul to be bound by the old prosody. Whatever he wrote must loaf along with perfect freedom, unpolished, haphazard, incoherent. The adjective that best describes his style is _loose_--not logical, rambling, suggestive. His mind saunters everywhither and does not concentrate. In other words, it is an uneducated mind, an unfocused mind, a primitive mind. The result was that, despite Whitman's freshness and force and stirring Americanism, he made little impression in the decade following the first _Leaves of Grass_. Emerson's commendation of him had been caused by his originality and his uncouth power, but none of the others of the mid-century school could see anything in the poems save vulgarity and egotistic posing. Lowell from first to last viewed him with aversion; Whittier burned the book at once as a nasty thing that had soiled him. The school of Keats and Tennyson, of Longfellow and Willis, ruled American literature with tyrannic power, and it was too early for successful revolution. III The Civil War found Whitman young; it left him an old man. There seems to have been no middle-age period in his life. He had matured with slowness; at forty, when he issued the 1860 _Leaves of Grass_, he was in the very prime of youth, the physical still central. There had been no suffering in his life, no grip of experience; he spoke much of the soul, but the soul was still of secondary importance. He wrote to his mother in 1862: