"Other poets," notes a writer in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1856), "other poets celebrate great events, personages, romances, wars, loves, passions, the victories and power of their country, or some real or imagined incident--and polish their work, and come to conclusions, and satisfy the reader. This poet celebrates natural propensities in himself; and that is the way he celebrates all. He comes to no conclusions, and does not satisfy the reader. He certainly leaves him what the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of the Paradise tree of the knowledge of good and evil, never to be erased again." "He stalks among the dapper gentlemen of this generation like a drunken Hercules amid the dainty dancers," suggested the Christian Spiritualist (1856). "The book abounds in passages that cannot be quoted in drawing rooms, and expressions that fall upon ears polite with a terrible dissonance." Nor was savage criticism in the years 1855 and 1856 limited to this side of the Atlantic. The London Critic, in a caustic review, found this the mildest comment that Whitman's verse warranted: "Walt Whitman gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. * * * Walt Whitman libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man; we who may have been misdirected by civilization, call it the expression of a beast." Noisy as was this babel of discordant voices, one friendly greeting rang clear. Leaves of Grass had but just come from the press, when Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his home in Concord, under date of July 21, 1855, wrote to the author in genuine fellowship: "I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging."