Whitman's moral consciousness was still predominant: he was an advocate of "causes". But his morality sprang out of a real passion for humanity, which took the form of sentiment; a sentiment which was thoroughly genuine at bottom, but which in its expression at this time, became false and stilted enough to bear the reproach of sentimentality. In view of their author's subsequent optimism, it is interesting to note that all these studies are of figures or incidents, more or less tragic. Whitman was puzzling over the ultimate questions: the problem of evil, as seen in the sufferings inflicted by tyrannical power, and by callous or lustful selfishness, upon innocent victims; on the inscrutable tragedies of disease and insanity; and again, upon the power of innocence, of sorrow and of love to evoke the good which he saw everywhere latent in human nature, and which a blind and heavy-handed legalitarian justice would destroy with the evil inseparable from it. The more he thought over these problems, the more he recognised the futility of condemnation, and the effectiveness of understanding love. * * * * * The _New World_, upon which he was working, published the first American versions of some of the principal novels of the day; it reprinted several of the new poems of Tennyson from English sources and contained long notices of such works as Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero-worship_. In November, 1842, it issued as an extra number Dickens's _American Notes_, the sensation of the hour--the author having been _fêted_ at the Park Theatre in February--and announced Lytton Bulwer's _Last of the Barons_ to follow. On the 23rd of the month, in the same fashion, appeared _Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate_, a tale of the times, by Walter Whitman. It was advertised as a thrilling romance by "one of the best novelists in this country"; and the proprietors of the magazine expressed their hope that the well-told incidents of the plot and the excellence of the moral would commend the book to general circulation. Nor were they disappointed. It is said that twenty thousand copies were sold. The book, then, achieved a tolerable success, and its author profited to the extent of some forty pounds. Copies of _Franklin Evans_ are now excessively rare, and one may say with confidence they will remain so. For the tale will never be reprinted. It claims to be written for the people and not for the critics, and even the people are unlikely to read it a second time.