erywhere:--

"Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."

He called upon the poet to

"Tell men what they knew before;
Paint the prospect from their door."

And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life
with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or
into a milking-pail.

This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted
moods he would have us

"Give to barrows, trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance."

But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:--

"What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps
Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet."

The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are
forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He
himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the
prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists"
have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr.
Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if
they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader
a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of
selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy
Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all
stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page
of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and
exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as
he might see fit.

French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the
slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that

"In the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings."

Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even
there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected
districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the
genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they
disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too
wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du
Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the senti