The appeal has this fine passage:--

"He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal
may often behold the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or
famine, or with both, passing with weary waft of wing from promontory
to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of rooks and crows,
which fall back screaming whenever the noble bird turns his indignant
head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him,
whenever he wends again upon his way."

Skipping many things I should yet like to touch upon,--for this paper is
already too long,--I will say in conclusion that, if any reader of mine
is moved by what I have here written to undertake the perusal of "Leaves
of Grass," or the later volume, "Two Rivulets," let me yet warn him
that he little suspects what is before him. Poetry in the Virgilian,
Tennysonian, or Lowellian sense it certainly is not. Just as the living
form of man in its ordinary garb is less beautiful (yet more beautiful)
than the marble statue; just as the living woman and child that may have
sat for the model is less beautiful (yet more so) than one of Raphael's
finest Madonnas, or just as a forest of trees addresses itself less
directly to the feeling of what is called art and form than the house or
other edifice built from them; just as you, and the whole spirit of our
current times, have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature or
Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but pictures, books, art,
and the selected and refined,--just so these poems will doubtless first
shock and disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful is never the
feeling directly and chiefly addressed in them, but your love for the
breathing flesh, the concrete reality, the moving forms and shows of the
universe. A man reaches and moves you, not an artist. Doubtless, too, a
certain withholding and repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous
to a cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the reaction,
the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge of the strong waves,
that you know what Walt Whitman's pages really are. They don't give
themselves at first,--like the real landscape and the sea, they are all
indirections. You may have to try them many times; there is something
of Nature's rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, but
probably always. But after you have mastered them by resigning yourself
to them, there is nothing like them anywhere in liter