"Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ some years ago. In it he describes vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of _Poems by Two Friends_, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first venture." We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw, among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my host, a portrait of Whitman. "Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city." "Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a country method. What he loved about the city was its people--he loved the throngs of men, he loved human associations. "But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the 'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as a printer and on the _Eagle_. "For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he got the stuff he put in _The Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver_. He put in it all the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers." John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated, with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's. "Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by Whitman. His _North of Boston_ is very good; it is genuine realism; it is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it all with keen interest. It's absolutely true.