One more comparison, and I will pursue the story. There is much which Whitman obviously shares with Shelley. Their kinship of inspiration is too significant for a passing note, and might well be followed over many pages. The writer of _Leaves of Grass_, and the youthful author of _Queen Mab_, had drunk at the same fountain of love and wonder.[191] Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_ should be read alongside of the Preface of 1855. In it also you will find it stated that the poet lives in the consciousness of the whole; that he is not to be bound by metrical custom, the distinction between poets and prose-writers being but a vulgar error; it is sufficient if his periods are harmonious and rhythmical. Poetry is therein discovered as the great instrument of morality, for it exercises and therefore strengthens the imagination, which is the organ of love--that going-out of a man from himself to others, in which morality finds the final expression. Here, as in Whitman's pages, the permanence of poetry is asserted; its significance is not to be exhausted by the generation in which it found expression. Poetry is the motive power of action and creates utilities. It is the root and blossom of science and philosophy. Poetry is the interpenetration of a diviner nature with our own; it turns all things to loveliness, and strips off that film of use and wont which holds our eyes from the vision of wonder. The great poets are men of supreme virtue and consummate prudence. They are the world's law-givers. It must be enough for us to have noted the parallel, which might easily be pressed too far. There are regions of thought and expression in which their opposition would, of course, appear even more striking; we need not pursue the subject, remembering that much of what they share derives from the influence which we associate with the works of Rousseau. * * * * * Whatever our opinion of Whitman's astonishing "piece of wit and wisdom," we cannot be surprised that in some quarters it was received with contemptuous silence, and in others with prompt and frank abuse. The _Boston Intelligencer_,[192] for instance, credited it to some escaped lunatic; the _Criterion_[193] to a man possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love; while the _London Critic_,[194] comparing him to Caliban, declared he should be whipped by the public executioner.