A SERENADE. THE moon is muffled in a cloud, That folds the lover’s star, But still beneath thy balcony I touch my soft guitar. If thou art waking, Lady dear, The fairest in the land, Unbar thy wreathed lattice now, And wave thy snowy hand. She hears me not; her spirit lies In trances mute and deep;―― But Music turns the golden key Within the gate of Sleep! Then let her sleep, and if I fail To set her spirit free! My song shall mingle in her dream, And she will dream of me! Illustration: (‡ decoration) Illustration: (‡ decoration) WALT WHITMAN. AUTHOR OF “LEAVES OF GRASS.” PERHAPS the estimates of critics differ more widely respecting the merits or demerits of Whitman’s verse than on that of any other American or English poet. Certain European critics regard him as the greatest of all modern poets. Others, both in this country and abroad, declare that his so called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of prose. One class characterizes him the “poet of democracy; the spokesman 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.” The other side, with equal assurance, assert that the Whitman _culte_ is the passing fad of a few literary men, and especially of a number of foreign critics like Rosetti, Swinburne and Buchanan, who were determined to find something unmistakably American――that is, different from anything else――and Whitman met this demand both in his personality and his verse. They further declared that his poetry was superlatively egotistical, his principal aim being always to laud himself. This criticism they prove by one of his own poems entitled “Walt Whitman,” in which he boldly preaches his claim to the love of the masses by declaring himself a “typical average man” and therefore “not individual” but “universal.” Perhaps it is better in the scope of this article to leave Walt Whitman between the fires of his laudators on one side and of his decriers on the other. Certainly the canons of poetic art will never consent to the introduction of some things that he has written into the treasure-house of the muses. For instance,―― “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.”