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."

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