Intelligent sympathy with the humblest, the power to see himself "in prison shaped like another man and feel the dull unintermitted pain," prompts him to exclaim:-- "I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will." An elemental poet of democracy, embodying its faults as well as its virtues, Whitman is noteworthy for voicing the new social spirit on which the twentieth century is relying for the regeneration of the masses. SUMMARY American fiction had for the most part been romantic from its beginning until the last part of the nineteenth century. Charles Brockden Brown, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain were all tinged with romanticism. In the latter part of the last century, there arose a school of realists who insisted that life should be painted as it is, without any addition to or subtraction from reality. This school did not ask, "Is the matter interesting or exciting?" but, "Is it true to life?" Howells and James were the leaders of the realists. Howells uses everyday incidents and conversations. James not infrequently takes unusual situations, so long as they conform to reality, and subjects them to the most searching psychological analysis. Mary Wilkins Freeman, a pupil of Howells, shows exceptional skill in depicting with realistic interest the humble life of provincial New England. While this school did not turn all writers into extreme realists, its influence was felt on the mass of contemporary fiction. Walt Whitman brings excessive realism into the form and matter of verse. For fear of using stock poetic ornaments, he sometimes introduces mere catalogues of names, uninvested with a single poetic touch. He is America's greatest poet of democracy. His work is characterized by altruism, by all-embracing sympathy, by emphasis on the social side of democracy, and by love of nature and the sea. REFERENCES Stanton's _A Manual of American Literature._ Alden's _Magazine Writing and the New Literature._ Perry's _A Study of Prose Fiction_, Chap. IX., _Realism_. Howells's _Criticism and Fiction_. Burt and Howells's _The Howells Story Book_. (Contains biographical matter.) Henry James's _The Art of Fiction_. Phelps's _William Dean Howells_, in _Essays on Modern Novelists_. Brownell's _Henry James_, in _American Prose Masters_. Canby's _The Short Story in English_. (James.) Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ (1897), 446 pp. (Contains all of his poems, the publication of which was authorized by himself.) Triggs's _Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Walt Whitman_. (The best for general readers.) Perry's _Walt Whitman, his Life, and Work_. (Excellent.) G. R. Carpenter's _Walt Whitman_. Platt's _Walt Whitman_. (_Beacon Biographies_) Noyes's _An Approach to Walt Whitman_. (Excellent.) Bucke's _Walt Whitman_. (A biography by one of his executors.) _In Re Walt Whitman_, edited by his literary executors. (Supplements Bucke.) Burroughs's _Whitman: A Study_.