result is quite
different.

More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other
poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies, rather than
in what he portrays; and more than any other poet must he wait to be
understood by the growth of the taste of himself. "I make the only growth
by which I can be appreciated," he truly says.

His words are like the manna that descended upon the Israelites, "in which
were all manner of tastes; and every one found in it what his palate was
chiefly pleased with. If he desired fat in it, he had it. In it the young
men tasted bread; the old men honey; and the children oil." Many young
men,--poets, artists, teachers, preachers,--have testified that they have
found bread in Whitman, the veritable bread of life; others have found
honey, sweet poetic morsels; and not a few report having found only gall.

VI

In considering an original work like "Leaves of Grass," the search is
always for the grounds upon which it is to be justified and explained.
These grounds in this work are not easy to find; they lie deeper than the
grounds upon which the popular poets rest. Because they are not at once
seen, many readers have denied that there are any such grounds. But to
deny a basis of reality to a work with the history of "Leaves of Grass,"
and a basis well grounded on aesthetic and artistic principles, is not to
be thought of.

The more the poet eludes us, the more we know he has his hiding-place
somewhere. The more he denies our standards, the more we know he has
standards of his own which we must discover; the more he flouts at our
literary conventions, the more we must press him for his own principles
and methods. How does he justify himself to himself? Could any sane man
have written the Children of Adam poems who was not sustained by deepest
moral and aesthetic convictions? It is the business of the critic to search
for these principles and convictions, and not shirk the task by ridicule
and denial.

VII

If there was never any change in taste, if it always ran in the same
channels,--indeed, if it did not at times run in precisely opposite
channels,--there would be little hope that Walt Whitman's poetry would
ever find any considerable number of readers. But one of the laws that
dominate the progress of literature, as Edmond Sherer says, is incessant
change, not only in thought and ideas, but in taste and the
starting-points of art. A radical and