ct health" is to be Greek. The
French "Revue des Deux Mondes" pronounces his war poems the most vivid,
the most humanly passionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of
the nineteenth century. Freiligrath translated him into German, and
hailed him as the founder of a new democratic and modern order of
poetry, greater than the old. But I do not propose to go over the whole
list here; I only wish to indicate that the absorption is well commenced
abroad, and that probably her poet will at last reach America by way of
those far-off, roundabout channels. The old mother will first masticate
and moisten the food which is still too tough for her offspring.

When I first fell in with "Leaves of Grass," I was taken by isolated
passages scattered here and there through the poems; these I seized
upon, and gave myself no concern about the rest. Single lines in it
often went to the bottom of the questions that were vexing me. The
following, though less here than when encountered in the frame of mind
which the poet begets in you, curiously settled and stratified a certain
range of turbid, fluctuating inquiry:--

"There was never any more inception than there is now,--
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."

These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not define,
and were of great service:--

"Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
The whole universe indicates that it is good,
The past and the present indicate that it is good."

In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper than
the words or the story:--

"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the wood-pile;
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in, and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and
bruis'd feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some
coarse clean clothes;
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles:
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North;
(I had him sit next me at table--my firelock lean'd in the corner.)"

But of the