l, all adventitious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm
could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of
language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless
hail of words,--not one softly padded verse anywhere.

All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the
form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready
to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids expression, and
lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke
out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse. The poet can "cut and
cover," as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one
whose form is essentially prose, like Whitman's.

I, too, love to see the forms worthily used, as they always are by the
master; and I have no expectation that they are going out of fashion
right away. A great deal of poetry that serves, and helps sweeten one's
cup, would be impossible without them,--would be nothing when separated
from them. It is for the ear, and for the sense of tune and of carefully
carved and modeled forms, and is not meant to arouse the soul with the
taste of power, and to start off on journeys for itself. But the great
inspired utterances, like the Bible,--what would they gain by being cast
in the moulds of metrical verse? In all that concerns art, viewed from
any high standpoint,--proportion, continence, self-control, unfaltering
adherence to natural standards, subordination of parts, perfect
adjustment of the means to the end, obedience to inward law, no
trifling, no levity, no straining after effect, impartially attending to
the back and loins as well as to the head, and even holding toward his
subject an attitude of perfect acceptance and equality,--principles
of art to which alone the great spirits are amenable,--in all these
respects, I say, this poet is as true as an orb in astronomy.

To his literary expression pitched on scales of such unprecedented
breadth and loftiness, the contrast of his personal life comes in with a
foil of curious homeliness and simplicity. Perhaps never before has
the absolute and average _commonness of humanity_ been so steadily and
unaffectedly adhered to. I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on
a Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at
sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers
on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced