During the summer of 1867 I had the opportunity (which I had often wished for) of expressing in print my estimate and admiration of the works of the American poet Walt Whitman.[1] Like a stone dropped into a pond, an article of that sort may spread out its concentric circles of consequences. One of these is the invitation which I have received to edit a selection from Whitman's writings; virtually the first sample of his work ever published in England, and offering the first tolerably fair chance he has had of making his way with English readers on his own showing. Hitherto, such readers--except the small percentage of them to whom it has happened to come across the poems in some one of their American editions--have picked acquaintance with them only through the medium of newspaper extracts and criticisms, mostly short-sighted, sneering, and depreciatory, and rather intercepting than forwarding the candid construction which people might be willing to put upon the poems, alike in their beauties and their aberrations. Some English critics, no doubt, have been more discerning--as W. J. Fox, of old, in the _Dispatch_, the writer of the notice in the _Leader_, and of late two in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the _London Review_;[2] but these have been the exceptions among us, the great majority of the reviewers presenting that happy and familiar critical combination-- scurrility and superciliousness. [Footnote 1: See _The Chronicle_ for 6th July 1867, article _Walt Whitman's Poems_.] [Footnote 2: Since this Prefatory Notice was written [in 1868], another eulogistic review of Whitman has appeared--that by Mr. Robert Buchanan, in the _Broadway_.] As it was my lot to set down so recently several of the considerations which seem to me most essential and most obvious in regard to Whitman's writings, I can scarcely now recur to the subject without either repeating something of what I then said, or else leaving unstated some points of principal importance. I shall therefore adopt the simplest course--that of summarising the critical remarks in my former article; after which, I shall leave without further development (ample as is the amount of development most of them would claim) the particular topics there glanced at, and shall proceed to some other phases of the subject. Whitman republished in 1867 his complete poetical works in one moderate- sized volume, consisting of the whole _Leaves of Grass_, with a sort of supplement thereto named _Songs before Parting_,[3] and of the _Drum Taps_, with its _Sequel_. It has been intimated that he does not expect to write any more poems, unless it might be in expression of the religious side of man's nature. However, one poem on the last American harvest sown and reaped by those who had been soldiers in the great war, has already appeared since the volume in question, and has been republished in England.