With foreign readers, all this counted for nothing. They were concerned not with the life of the man, but with the work of the artist, and they found that work consummately good. They were charmed and thrilled by the haunting melody of his verse and the weird horror of his tales. In his own country, recognition of his genius has grown rapidly of recent years. Within his own sphere, he is unquestionably the greatest artist America can boast--he climbed Parnassus higher than any of his countrymen, and if he did not quite attain a seat among the immortals, he at least caught some portion of their radiance. After Poe, the man whom foreign critics consider America's most representative poet is another who has been without honor in his own country, and about whom, even yet, there is the widest difference of opinion--Walt Whitman. Whitman was ostracized for many years not because of his life, which was regular and admirable enough, but because of his verse, which is exceedingly irregular in more than one respect. Whitman was by birth and training a man of the people. His father was a carpenter, and, after receiving a common-school education, the boy entered a printer's office at the age of thirteen. A printer's office is, in itself, a source of education, and Whitman soon began to write for the papers, finally going to New York City, where, for twelve years, he worked on Newspaper Row, as reporter or compositor, making friends with all sorts and conditions of men and entering heart and soul into the busy life of the great city. The people, the seething masses on the streets, had a compelling fascination for him. Tiring of New York, at last, he started on a tramp trip to the southwest, worked in New Orleans and other towns, swung around through the northwest, and so back to Brooklyn, where he became, strangely enough, a contractor--a builder and seller of houses. He had been reading a great deal, all these years, but as yet had given no indication of what was to be his literary life-work. And yet, fermenting inside the man and at last demanding expression, was a strange new philosophy of democracy, all-tolerant, holding the individual to be of the first importance, male and female equal, the body to be revered no less than the soul. For the promulgation of this philosophy, some worthy literary form was needed--poetry, since that was the noblest form, but poetry stripped of conventions and stock phrases, as "fluent and free as the people and the land and the great system of democracy which it was to celebrate." With some such idea as this, not outlined in words, nor, perhaps, very clearly understood even by himself, Whitman set to work, and the result was the now famous "Leaves of Grass," a collection of twelve poems, printed by the author in Brooklyn in 1855.