e break out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that
had been uncovered? This reckon would be a favorite passage with all:--

"You sea! I resign myself to you also--I guess what you mean;
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers;
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
We must have a turn together--I undress--hurry me out of sight of
the land;
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse;
Dash me with amorous wet--I can repay you.

"Sea of stretch'd ground-swells!
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths!
Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel'd yet always ready graves!
Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!
I am integral with you--I too am of one phase, and of all phases."

This other passage would afford many a text for the moralists and
essayists:--

"Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship,
and the like;
To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
except as it results to their Bodies and Souls,
So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked,
And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself
or herself,
And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of
the rotten excrement of maggots;
And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true
realities of life, and go toward false realities,
And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served
them, but nothing more,
And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules,
walking the dusk."

Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play with us! The old
is already proved,--the past and the distant hold nothing but the
beautiful.

Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and
some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected
him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background,
formulated and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art
which he illustrates, and which are the inevitable logic of his
poems,--said essayist would have won great applause. "Yes, indeed, that
were a poet to cherish; fill those shoes and you have a god."

How different a critic's account of Shakespeare from Shakespeare
himself,--the difference between the hewn or sawed timber and the living
tree! A few years ago we had here a lecturer from over seas, who gave to
our well-dr