greets the
appearance of an exceptional book, though Emerson recognized its worth.
So when occasionally we admit, shyly and apologetically, as is our habit
(in the way we confess that once we enjoyed sugar candy), that long ago
we used to read Emerson, it would do our superior culture no harm to
remember that Emerson was at least the first of the world of letters to
tell the new poet that his _Leaves_ was "the most extraordinary piece of
wit and wisdom America has yet produced." Nothing in all his writing
proves the quality of Emerson's mind so well as his instant and full
knowledge of Whitman, when others felt that what Whitman was really
inviting was laughter and abuse. I suppose what the young poet meant when
he said reading Whitman was like a mouthful of glass was that Whitman has
no music, and so cannot be read aloud. There is always a fair quantity of
any poet's work which would do much to make this world a cold and
unfriendly place if we persevered in reading it aloud. In some
circumstances even Shakespeare might cause blasphemy. Perhaps he has. And
Whitman, like summer-time, and all of us, is not always at his best. But
I think it is possible that many people to-day will know the music and
the solace of the great dirge beginning "When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloom'd." And again, if capturing with words those surmises which
intermittently and faintly show in the darkness of our speculations and
are at once gone, if the making of a fixed star of such wayward glints is
the mark of a poet, then Whitman gave us "On the beach at night."

I had never thought Whitman so good till that soldier's letter
accidentally discovered it to me. If Whitman had been through the
campaign across the narrow straits, if Ypres, Vimy, and Cambrai had been
in his own experience, he could have added little to Drum Taps. For there
is nothing that is new in war. It is only the campaign that is new, and
the men who are young. Yet all has happened before. But each young
soldier in a new campaign feels that his experience is strangely
personal. He will have the truth revealed to him, and will think that it
is an intimacy for his soul alone; yet others, too, have seen it, but are
dead. The survivors of this War will imagine their experiences unique,
admonitory, terrible, and that if they had the words to tell us their
knowledge they would not be believed or understood. That is why the
succeeding generation, too, gets caught. Yet there is enou