he
frozen surface,
The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep
with his axe,
Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees,
Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those
drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons
around them,
In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their
day's sport,
The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his
wife;
And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am."

What is this but tufts and tussocks of grass; not branching trees, nor yet
something framed and deftly put together, but a succession of simple
things, objects, actions, persons; handfuls of native growths, a stretch
of prairie or savanna; no composition, no artistic wholes, no logical
sequence, yet all vital and real; jets of warm life that shoot and play
over the surface of contemporary America, and that the poet uses as the
stuff out of which to weave the song of himself.

This simple aggregating or cataloguing style as it has been called, and
which often occurs in the "Leaves," has been much criticised, but it seems
to me in perfect keeping in a work that does not aim at total artistic
effects, at finished structural perfection like architecture, but to
picture the elements of a man's life and character in outward scenes and
objects and to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward to
it. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until,
so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them into
patterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method is
inartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has its
own value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to this
succession of one line genre word painting.

But this is not the way of the great artists. No, but it is Whitman's way,
and these things have a certain artistic value in his work, a work that
professedly aims to typify his country and times,--the value of mu