pinion, or any man's opinion,
of the works of another, is like a wind that blows for a moment across
the water, heaping it up a little on the shore or else beating it down,
but not in any way permanently affecting its proper level.

The adverse winds that have blown over Whitman's work have been many and
persistent, and yet the tide has surely risen, his fame has slowly
increased.

It will soon be forty years since he issued the first thin quarto edition
of "Leaves of Grass," and, though the opposition to him has been the most
fierce and determined ever recorded in our literary history, often
degenerating into persecution and willful misrepresentation, yet his fame
has steadily grown both at home and abroad. The impression he early made
upon such men as Emerson, Thoreau, William O'Connor, Mr. Stedman, Colonel
Ingersoll, and others in this country, and upon Professors Dowden and
Clifford, upon Symonds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Rossetti, Lord Lytton, Mrs.
Gilchrist, George Eliot, in England, has been followed by an equally deep
or deeper impression upon many of the younger and bolder spirits of both
hemispheres. In fact Whitman saw his battle essentially won in his own
lifetime, though his complete triumph is of course a matter of the distant
future.

XIII

But let me give without further delay a fuller hint of the attitude these
pages assume and hold towards the subject they discuss.

There are always, or nearly always, a few men born to each generation who
embody the best thought and culture of that generation, and express it in
approved literary forms. From Petrarch down to Lowell, the lives and works
of these men fill the literary annals; they uphold the literary and
scholarly traditions; they are the true men of letters; they are justly
honored and beloved in their day and land. We in this country have
recently, in the death of Dr. Holmes, mourned the loss of the last of the
New England band of such men. We are all indebted to them for solace, and
for moral and intellectual stimulus.

Then, much more rarely, there is born to a race or people men who are like
an irruption of life from another world, who belong to another order, who
bring other standards, and sow the seed of new and larger types; who are
not the organs of the culture or modes of their time, and whom their times
for the most part decry and disown,--the primal, original, elemental men.
It is here, in my opinion, that we must place Whitman; not among the