unhesitating frankness of a man who dares to call simplest things by their plain names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful,” there is involved “a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is, than in any thing we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act, so far known of;” and concludes by declaring that “the author will soon make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and the outer life.” The London _Leader_, one of the foremost of the British literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception of the true character and purport of the book, than any I have seen, has the following sentences: “Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the _Leaves_, and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet _must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start_.’ The last clause was, however, overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to instruction. The authority for so treating the author was derived from himself, who thus described, in one of his poems, his person, character, and name, having omitted the last from the title-page:— ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual,’— and in various other passages, confessed to all the vices, as well as the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word ‘kosmos,’ the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow;—not so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information; but they saw it not, because it did not answer their purpose to see it. . . . . . The poem in which the word ‘kosmos’ appears explains in fact the whole mystery—nay, the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, but really includes everybody. It begins:— ‘I celebrate myself; And what I assume, you shall assume; For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.’