stheticism.'
'_Leaves of Grass_ . . . has mainly been the outcropping of my own
emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to
put _a Person_, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I
could not find any similar personal record in current literature that
satisfied me.' In these words Walt Whitman gives us the true attitude we
should adopt towards his work, having, indeed, a much saner view of the
value and meaning of that work than either his eloquent admirers or noisy
detractors can boast of possessing. His last book, _November Boughs_, as
he calls it, published in the winter of the old man's life, reveals to
us, not indeed a soul's tragedy, for its last note is one of joy and
hope, and noble and unshaken faith in all that is fine and worthy of such
faith, but certainly the drama of a human soul, and puts on record with a
simplicity that has in it both sweetness and strength the record of his
spiritual development, and of the aim and motive both of the manner and
the matter of his work. His strange mode of expression is shown in these
pages to have been the result of deliberate and self-conscious choice.
The 'barbaric yawp' which he sent over 'the roofs of the world' so many
years ago, and which wrung from Mr. Swinburne's lip such lofty panegyric
in song and such loud clamorous censure in prose, appears here in what
will be to many an entirely new light. For in his very rejection of art
Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by
certain means and he succeeded. There is much method in what many have
termed his madness, too much method, indeed, some may be tempted to
fancy.

In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of
sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:

Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a
stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island's seashores--there,
in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old
and New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me
than in any library or indoor room--it makes such difference _where_
you read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get
of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient
Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.
A