Tracing the popular estimates of Walt Whitman through the next five years, expressions of unmeasured disapproval similar to those quoted may be found in periodicals and in the daily press, with here and there grudging admission that despite unseemly tendencies, there is evident originality and even genius in the pages of this unusual book. In a comparatively temperate review, August 4, 1860, the Cosmopolite, of Boston, while deploring that nature is treated here without fig-leaves, declares the style wonderfully idiomatic and graphic, adding: "In his frenzy, in the fire of his inspiration, are fused and poured out together elements hitherto considered antagonistic in poetry--passion, arrogance, animality, philosophy, brag, humility, rowdyism, spirituality, laughter, tears, together with the most ardent and tender love, the most comprehensive human sympathy which ever radiated its divine glow through the pages of poems." A contemporary of this date, the Boston Post, found nothing to commend. "Grass," said the writer, making the title of the book his text, "grass is the gift of God for the healthy sustenance of his creatures, and its name ought not to be desecrated by being so improperly bestowed upon these foul and rank leaves of the poison-plants of egotism, irreverance, and of lust, run rampant and holding high revel in its shame." And the London Lancet, July 7, 1860, comments in this wise: "Of all the writers we have ever perused, Walt Whitman is the most silly, the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting. If we can think of any stronger epithets, we will print them in a second edition." II What were these poems which excited such vitriolic epithets? Taking both the editions of 1855 and of the year following, and indeed including all of the four hundred poems bearing Whitman's authorship in the three-quarters of a half-century during which his final volume was in the making, scarcely half a dozen poems can be found which could give offense to the most prudish persons. Nearly all of these have been grouped, with some others, under the general sub-title Children of Adam. There are poems which excite the risibles of some readers, there are poems which read like the lists of a mail-order house, and others which appear in spots to have been copied bodily from a gazetteer. These, however, are more likely to provoke good-natured banter than violent denunciatory passion. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose generous greeting and meed of praise in the birth-year of Leaves of Grass will be recalled, in sending a copy of it to Carlyle in 1860, and commending it to his interest, added: "And after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it."