His ear unconsciously seemed to demand the roll of the dactyl, then a cesura after from five to seven beats, then a closing roll longer or shorter as his mood struck him. The greater number of his later lines open as if the line was to be a hexameter: "Over the breast of the spring," "Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat," "Passing the apple tree blows," "Coffin that passes through lakes," and so on and on. But one can make a broader statement. The total effect of the poems after 1870, like the "Song of the Redwood," for instance, is hexametric, though few of the lines may be hexameters as they stand. One might arrange this song like this: A California song, | a prophecy and indirection, A thought impalpable | to breathe as air, a chorus Of dryads, fading departing, | or hamadryads departing, A murmuring, fateful giant | voice out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying | tree in the redwood forest Dense. Farewell my brethren, | Farewell O earth and sky, Farewell ye neighboring waters, | my time has ended, my term Has come along the northern coast | just back from the rockbound shore, And the caves in the saline air | from the sea in the Mendocino Country with the surge for base | and accompaniment low and hoarse, With crackling blows of axes | sounding musically driven By strong arms driven deep | by the sharp tongues of the axes, There in the redwood forest | dense I heard the mighty Tree in its death chant chanting. Crude hexameters these undoubtedly, requiring much wrenching and eliding at times, yet for all that as one reads them aloud one cannot escape the impression that the total effect is hexametric. May it not be that the primal time beat for poetry is the hexameter, and that the prehistoric poets evolved it spontaneously even as the creator of _Leaves of Grass_ evolved it? VII To insist that Whitman has had small influence on later poetry because none of the later poets has made use of his chant is feeble criticism. No poet even _can_ make use of his verse form without plagiarism, for his loose-fingered chords and his peculiar time-beat, his line-lengths, his wrenched hexameters--all this was Whitman himself. In all other ways he enormously influenced his age. His realism, his concrete pictures, his swing and freedom, his Americanism, his insistence upon message, ethic purpose, absolute fidelity to the here and now rather than to books of the past--all have been enormously influential. He is the central figure of the later period, the voice in the wilderness that hailed its dim morning and the strong singer of its high noon. BIBLIOGRAPHY WALT WHITMAN. (1819-1892.) During the lifetime of the poet there were issued ten editions of _Leaves of Grass_, with the following dates: 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881, 1888, 1889, 1891.