It is the same thrill that had aroused Stedman, and made him proud for the first time of his country. Henceforth the poet will sing of Men--men not as magnificent bodies, but as triumphant souls. _Drum-Taps_ fairly quivers and sobs and shouts with a new life. America has risen at last--one feels it in every line. The book gives more of the actual soul of the great conflict and of the new spirit that arose from it than any other book ever written. "Come up from the Fields, Father," tells with simple pathos that chief tragedy of the war, the death message brought to parents; "The Wound-Dresser" pictures with a realism almost terrifying the horrors of the hospitals after a battle; "Beat! Beat! Drums!" arouses like a bugle call; such sketches as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," and "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," are full of the thrill and the excitement of war; and finally the poems in "Memories of President Lincoln": among them "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain! My Captain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," come near to the highest places yet won by elegaic verse in English. IV In June, 1865, after he had served for a short time as a clerk in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in September the same year a pamphlet entitled _The Good Gray Poet_, defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extravagance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be original and intensely American.