izing the delicious pleasure of his sex, or a
woman hers? Nature he proclaims inherently clean. Sex will not be put
aside; it is the great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle
of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his
writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention
and effort. To men and women, he says, you can have healthy and
powerful breeds of children on no less terms than these of mine.
Follow me, and there shall be taller and richer crops of humanity on
the earth."

From Studies among the Leaves, printed in the Crayon (New York, 1856),
this extract may be taken: "With a wonderful vigor of thought and
intensity of perception, a power, indeed, not often found, Leaves of
Grass has no identity, no concentration, no purpose--it is barbarous,
undisciplined, like the poetry of a half-civilized people, and as a
whole useless, save to those miners of thought who prefer the metal in
its unworked state."

The New York Daily Times (1856) asks: "What Centaur have we here, half
man, half beast, neighing defiance to all the world? What conglomerate
of thought is this before us, with insolence, philosophy, tenderness,
blasphemy, beauty, and gross indecency tumbling in drunken confusion
through the pages? Who is this arrogant young man who proclaims
himself the Poet of the time, and who roots like a pig among a rotten
garbage of licentious thoughts?"

"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,