A first impression of _Leaves of Grass_ is of uncouthness and blatancy, together with something yet more objectionable. The writer would seem to be a man fond of shocking what are called the proprieties, so frank and egregious is his animalism, so overpowering his self-assertiveness. The author of _Laus Veneris_ accuses Whitman of indecency. The charge is a grave one and emanates from a high source. The distinguished English poet admits that there are few subjects which ‘may not be treated with success;’ but the treatment is everything. This is ‘a radical and fundamental truth of criticism.’ Whitman’s indecency then consists not so much in the choice of the subject as in the awkwardness of the touch. Or as Swinburne puts it with characteristic emphasis: ‘Under the dirty paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first principle of nature--the passion of man for woman or the passion of woman for man.’ But along with that first impression of Whitman’s verse as the product of a strong, coarse nature, wilfully brutal at times, comes the no less marked impression that the man is serenely honest, and animated by a benevolence which helps to relieve the brutality of its most repulsive features. At all events, Whitman is what Carlyle might have described as ‘one of the palpablest of Facts in this miserable world where so much is Invertebrate and Phantasmal.’ Whether we like him or not, Whitman is by no means one of those neutral literary persons who are in danger of being overlooked. In fact, the word ‘literary’ as applied to the author of _Leaves of Grass_ is singularly inept. Whitman is not literary, that is to say he is not a product of libraries. No meek and reverent follower of poets gone before is this. ‘He has no literary ancestor, he is an ancestor himself’--or at least takes the attitude of one. He is a son of earth, a genuine autochthon, naked and not ashamed, noisy, vociferous, naïvely delighted with the music of his own raucous voice. In that first great rhapsody, ‘Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,’[71] we have the most characteristic expression of his genius. He proclaims his interest in all that concerns mankind--not a cold, objective interest merely, he is himself a part of the mighty pageant of life, sympathetic with every phase of joy and sorrow, identifying himself with high and low, finding nothing mean or contemptible. He states the idea with a hundred variations, returns upon it, sets it in new lights, enforces it. Every phenomenon of human life teaches this lesson. Every pleasure, every grief, every experience small or great concerns him. He identifies himself with the life of the most miserable of creatures:-- I am possess’d! Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain.