me-honored old instruments, and hordes of them long ago rushed to
America with their theodolites and their quadrants in their hands. They
sized us up and they sized us down, and they never could find greatness
in literature among us till Walt Whitman appeared and satisfied the
astrologers.

Here was a comet, a man of the people, a new man, who spoke no known
language, who was very uncouth and insulting, who proclaimed himself a
"barbaric yawp," and who corresponded to the English imagination with
the unpleasant and rampant wildness of everything in America,--with
Mormonism and car factories, steamboat explosions, strikes, repudiation,
and whiskey; whose form violated every one of their minor canons as
America violated every one of their social ideas.

Then, too, Whitman arose out of the war, as Shakespeare arose out of the
destruction of the Armada, as the Greek poets arose out of the repulse
of the Persians. It was impossible, it was unprecedented, that a
national revulsion should not produce national poetry--and lo! here was
Whitman.

It may safely be said that the discovery of Whitman as a poet caused
many a hard-thinking Oxford man to sleep quietly at night. America was
solved.

The Englishman travels, but he travels after his mind has been burnished
by the university, and at an age when the best he can do in the line of
thought is to make an intelligent manipulation of the few notions he
leaves home with. He departs an educated gentleman, taking with him his
portmanteau and his ideas. He returns a travelled gentleman, bringing
with him his ideas and his portmanteau. He would as soon think of
getting his coats from Kansas as his thoughts from travel. And therefore
every impression of America which the travelling Englishman experienced
confirmed his theory of Whitman. Even Rudyard Kipling, who does not in
any sense fall under the above description, has enough Anglo-Saxon blood
in him to see in this country only the fulfilment of the fantastic
notions of his childhood.

But imagine an Oxford man who had eyes in his head, and who should come
to this country, never having heard of Whitman. He would see an
industrious and narrow-minded population, commonplace and monotonous, so
uniform that one man can hardly be distinguished from another,
law-abiding, timid, and traditional; a community where the individual is
suppressed by law, custom, and instinct, and in which, by consequence,
there are few or no great men, eve