ead him because
he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such
a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the
human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not
many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to {550}
the _Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and
the individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the
_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too
early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But
it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet
as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and
feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and
even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the
literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate
reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists,
but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward
the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new
stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the
_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most
inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank
verse, for example, in the _Man-o'-War-Bird_:

"Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.,

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters:

"Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . .
Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth."

{551} Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from
ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show:

"My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won.
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck, my captain lies
Fallen, cold and dead."

This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman
has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry:
_Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil