He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these: "And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north." Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the _Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to the _Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the _dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate