to decide, and they might
wrangle as they pleased. But here was Walt Whitman, recognizing no
beauty higher than creative nature, recognizing no law greater than the
spontaneous dictates of the moral personality; here was Walt Whitman, a
pagan, a pantheist, who recognized more divinity in an outcast human
being than in a grandly ordained king, who acknowledged nothing higher
than the dignity of the human individuality,--all this was enough to
make sober people pause and think, if not shudder.

'Tis true that some, almost all the representative men of literature in
England, recognized in Walt Whitman, from the first, a beauty, a
grandeur, which appealed to and captivated their higher susceptibilities
and mental appreciation. Such critics as George Eliot, Dowden, and even
Matthew Arnold, and such poets as Tennyson, Swinburne, and even William
Morris, have uttered expressions of the warmest appreciation of his
great talent; but the class of general readers are not endowed with such
discrimination, and his works, till very recently, were excluded from
the shelves of libraries which were catholic enough to embrace the
writings of the earliest saints and the latest productions of Zola--on
the ground that his poetry was too demoralizing for the general public.

This is not a general statement. I have a specific instance in view,
when, in 1886, I went to the Leinster House in Dublin--the public
library of the place--and asked for Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." On
being informed that they had no copy of it in the library, I put down
the book in the suggestion list. A number of Trinity students did the
same. The matter was brought before the directors at their monthly
meeting, and it appears it was strenuously objected to by the librarian,
who pleaded the exclusion of the book on the ground of its being
immoral, indecent! We carried the fight from private discussion to
correspondence in the press; the editor of the _Dublin University
Review_ put the pages of the magazine at our disposal, and it was not
until a year afterwards, and until considerable pressure was brought on
the directors, that "Leaves of Grass" was admitted into the catalogues
of the Dublin library.

But the genuine merit of Walt Whitman's works, as the true inspiration
of individualistic genius is always destined to do, is rapidly
conquering the opposition and prejudice even of those whose obtuse minds
seldom discover the intrinsic good motive frequently und