For a considerable time many people knew Whitman by this one line alone. They concluded that he was a barbarian and that all that he said was "yawp." Although much of his work certainly deserved this characterization, yet those who persisted in reading him soon discovered that their condemnation was too sweeping, as most were willing to admit after they had read, for instance, _When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd_, a poem that Swinburne called "the most sonorous nocturn yet chanted in the church of the world." The three _motifs_ of this song are the lilac, the evening star, and the hermit thrush:-- "Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim." In the same class we may place such poems as _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_, where we listen to a song as if from "Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle." Whitman also wrote in almost regular meter his dirge on Lincoln, the greatest dirge of the Civil War:-- "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting." In 1888 Whitman wrote that "from a worldly and business point of view, _Leaves of Grass_ has been worse than a failure--that public criticism on the book and myself as author of it yet shows mark'd anger and contempt more than anything else." But he says that he had comfort in "a small band of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause." He was also well received in England. He met with cordial appreciation from Tennyson. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), a graduate of Oxford and an authority on Greek poetry and the Renaissance, wrote, "_Leaves of Grass_, which I first read at the age of twenty-five, influenced me more, perhaps, than any other book has done except the _Bible_; more than Plato, more than Goethe." Had Whitman lived until 1908, he would probably have been satisfied with the following statement from his biographer, Bliss Perry, formerly professor of English at Princeton, "These primal and ultimate things Whitman felt as few men have ever felt them, and he expressed them, at his best, with a nobility and beauty such as only the world's very greatest poets have surpassed." GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. His most pronounced single characteristic is his presentation of democracy:-- "Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine." He said emphatically, "Without yielding an inch, the working man and working woman were to be in my pages from first to last." He is the only American poet of his rank who remained through life the close companion of day laborers. Yet, although he is the poet of democracy, his poetry is too difficult to be read by the masses, who are for the most part ignorant of the fact that he is their greatest representative poet.