mournful and noble of all love songs, “Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd,” in _Drum-Taps_; or the “Word out of the Sea,” the “Elemental Drifts,” the entire section entitled “Walt Whitman,” the hymn commencing “Splendor of falling day,” or the great salute to the French Revolution of ’93, entitled “France,” in _Leaves of Grass_. If these are not examples of great structural harmony as well as of the highest poetry, there are none in literature. And if all these were wanting, there is a single poem in the late volume, _Drum-Taps_, which, if the author had never written another line, would be sufficient to place him among the chief poets of the world. I do not refer to “Chanting the Square Deific”—though that also would be sufficient, in its incomparable breadth and grandeur of conception and execution, to establish the highest poetic reputation—but to the strain commemorating the death of the beloved President, commencing, “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed”—a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture of tender religious passion, spreading aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and solitary in literature, and will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of Death forever. Emperors might well elect to die, could their memories be surrounded with such a requiem, which, next to the grief and love of the people, is the grandest and the only grand funeral music poured around Lincoln’s bier. In the face of works like these, testimony of the presence on earth of a mighty soul, I am thunderstruck at the low tone of the current criticism. Even from eminent persons, who ought to know how to measure literature, and who are friendly to this author, I hear, mingled with inadequate praise, the self-same censures—the very epithets, even, which Voltaire, not more ridiculously, passed upon Shakespeare. Take care, gentlemen! What you, like Voltaire, take for rudeness, chaos, barbarism, lack of form, may be the sacred and magnificent wildness of a virgin world of poetry, all unlike these fine and ordered Tennysonian rose-gardens which are your ideal, but excelling these as the globe excels the parterre. I, at any rate, am not deceived. I see how swiftly the smart, bright, conventional standards of modern criticism would assign Isaiah or Ezekiel to the limbo of abortions. I see of how limited worth are the wit and scholarship of these _Saturday Reviews_ and _London Examiners_, with their _doppelgangers_ on this side of the Atlantic, by the treatment some poetic masterpiece of China or Hindustan receives when it falls into their hands for judgment. Any thing not cast in modern conventional forms, any novel or amazing beauty, strikes them as comic. Read Mr. Buckley’s notes, even at this late day, on a poet so incredibly great as Æschylus. Read an Æschylus illustrated by reference to Nicholas Nickleby, Mrs. Bombazine, and Mantalini, and censured in contemptuous, jocular, or flippant annotations—this, too, by an Oxford scholar of rank and merit! No