ith prosecution by the district
attorney.

1889--EIGHTH EDITION. In celebration of the author's seventieth
birthday, a special autograph edition of three hundred copies was
issued.

1892--NINTH EDITION. Whitman supervised the make-up of this issue
during his last illness.

1897--TENTH EDITION. Here appeared for the first time, Old Age Echoes,
numbering thirteen poems.

1902--ELEVENTH AND DEFINITIVE EDITION. Issued by the literary
executors of Walt Whitman--Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke,
and Thomas B. Harned.

There have been six editions of Whitman's complete writings, and
numerous selections from Leaves of Grass have been published under the
editorship of well-known literary men--among them, William M.
Rossetti, Ernest Rhys, W. T. Stead, and Oscar L. Triggs. There have
been translations into German, French, Italian, Russian, and several
Asiatic languages.

"I had my choice when I commenc'd," he notes in his Backward Glance of
1880; "I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the
approbation of existing schools and conventions.... Unstopp'd and
unwarp'd by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my
say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record--the value
thereof to be decided by time."

III

With the war-time period came the turning point in the popular
estimate of Walt Whitman. No doubt, too, his experiences during this
time of stress and storm influenced the rest of his career as a man
and as a writer. His service as a volunteer nurse in camp and in
hospital gave him a sympathetic insight and a patriotic outlook
tempered with gentleness which are reflected in his poetry of this
period, published under the title Drum-Taps. His well-known song of
sorrow, O Captain, My Captain, is a threnody poignant with genuine
feeling. It has, more than any others of his verses, lyric rather than
plangent quality. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, and The
Sobbing of the Bells are other poems belonging to this distinctive
group. It is notable that in his lament over the death of Lincoln,
Whitman gives rhyme as well as rhythm to the verses.

This was a time of triumph for Whitman in a literary sense. In
Germany, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath contributed to the Allgemeine
Zeitung, Augsburg, May 10, 1868, a long article in praise of his work.
In England, his poetry attracted the attention of the Rossettis,
Tennyson, John Addington Symonds. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist d