"As a nymph of the invisible air before her mortal beloved, so I glance before you. I dart and stand in your path, and turn away from your heedless eyes like one in pain. I am the ground; I listen to the sound of your feet. They come nearer. I shut my eyes and feel their tread over my face," etc. etc.; or such an outburst as this: "Ireland--liberty's deathless flame leaping on her Atlantic shore,"--are enough to convince the human mind that men who write them can be actuated only by impulses of which genius alone is capable! It is this impulse--this sober, solemn love pervading the writings of Walt Whitman which has invested his compositions with a property far transcending in genuine beauty the effusions of those poets whose object in writing is more the display of a capacity for finished manipulation of delicate form, than the manifestation of a free conception of a grand spirit. Walt Whitman is spontaneous without being careless. His style is unhesitating, his diction is flowing, smooth, without being searching or verbose! It seems as if his soul were responsive--not plaintively, but appreciatively responsive--to all the chords, influences, and objects of nature; and that his imagination were absorptive enough to embrace and love, and reflect all changes and transitions of light and shadow in nature and life, particularly in the inner human life,--for Walt Whitman's love for humanity, permeating all his writings, has more grandeur than the most heroic of classic epics! _Roman I. Zubof._ BOSTON, Mass. SHALL WRITERS COMBINE? Things in this world are often the precise opposite of what we should expect. The shoemaker's wife and the blacksmith's horse frequently go poorly shod. The man who makes his sole living from the product of his brains does not use them in disposing of his wares. He remains the slave of publishers who have enriched themselves from his labor, while he thoughtlessly plods on, apparently content with a few crumbs from the feast which he has provided for them. One striking difference between the two halves of the nineteenth century is the gigantic combination which the shuttle of these latter years is weaving. The wealth of no single man was found sufficient to place a railroad across the continent. Men combined their capital, and to-day we can ride from New York to San Francisco in a car as luxuriously furnished as a drawing-room. Had it not been for this union of dollars, we should to-day be forced to use the stage coach or to walk. When the railroads were once built, their owners found combination necessary to keep them from cutting each other's throats and to maintain a good rate of profit. By combination the working man has reduced his hours of toil, obtained a fairer share of the profits coming to capital from his labor, and made his own life better worth the living. These concessions did not come voluntarily: combination wrung them from capital, and then stood guard over them.