r many
children; the pouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of
splendor, incessant and branching, the tremendous elements,
breeds, adjustments of America--with all these, with more,
with everything transcendent, amazing and new, undimmed by the
pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of
actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being
unwinds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To
understand Greece, study the Iliad and the Odyssey; study
Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her democracy is there.
Would you have a text-book of democracy? The writings of
Jefferson are good; De Tocqueville is better; but the great
poet always contains historian and philosopher--and to know
the comprehending spirit of this country, you shall question
these insulted pages."

IV

It would be wearisome to refer in detail to the numerous estimates of
Leaves of Grass which have found print since 1870. The increasing
literature about Whitman bespeaks interest, and the kindly tenor of
most commentators testifies to the enlarging appreciation of the Good
Gray Poet. Within the past decade there have appeared seven
biographies of him, all but one of them wholly and frankly lavish in
his praise, and that one not unfriendly in criticism. Numerous book
chapters have dealt with him in recognition of his genius, and only
here and there have there been suggestions of earlier absolute
condemnation. Among the biographers have been, in chronological
sequence, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Burroughs, John Addington
Symonds, Isaac Hull Platt, Geo. R. Carpenter, Bliss Perry, Henry Bryan
Binns. Among the notable contributors of book chapters on Whitman may
be mentioned from a list of two score or more, Robert Louis Stevenson,
in his Studies of Men and Books; A. T. Quiller-Couch, in his
Adventures in Criticism; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his
Contemporaries; Havelock Ellis, in The New Spirit; Edward Dowden, in
his Studies in Literature; Edmund Gosse, in his Critical Kit-Kats;
Hamilton Mabie, in his Backgrounds of Literature; Brander Matthews, in
his Aspects of Fiction; Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his Poets of
America; George Santayana, in The Poetry of Barbarism; and Algernon
Charles Swinburne, in his Studies in Prose and Poetry. These have been
mentioned specifically because they average the good and the bad
rather than join in a chorus of indiscriminate praise