rds those models of form in verse
which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have
been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical
repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that
is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York
of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked
established religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn _Eagle_
on that eminently important body.

The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had been broken by the time
that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the
curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted
the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that
Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that
"Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not
detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons
brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?

And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt
Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe
ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the
young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as
Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us
much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of
Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence
of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant
Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel
Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a
devout Whitmanite. Much younger was Harrison Morris, whose opinions,
carrying great weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have said,
Whitman neither startled nor shocked us nor did he cause us to imitate
him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the
dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured
with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a
poor medium for lyrical expression or suc