. Indeed, the two
last mentioned are distinctly hostile in tone. Swinburne, who in his
earlier volume Songs before Sunrise, addressed a long poem, To Walt
Whitman in America, fervent in praise,

"Send but a song oversea for us,
Heart of their hearts who are free,
Heart of their singer to be for us
More than our singing can be,"

revoked all his former words of sympathetic admiration and in his
later volume, printed in 1894, vehemently fell upon Whitman in this
strain:

"There is no subject which may not be treated with success (I
do not say there are no subjects which on other than artistic
grounds it may not be as well to avoid, it may not be better
to pass by) if the poet, by instinct or by training, knows
exactly how to handle it aright, to present it without danger
of just or rational offense. For evidence of this truth we
need look no further than the pastorals of Virgil and
Theocritus. But under the dirty clumsy paws of a harper whose
plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of
discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first
principle of nature--the passion of man for woman or the
passion of woman for man. And the unhealthily demonstrative
and obtrusive animalism of the Whitmaniad is as unnatural, as
incompatible with the wholesome instincts of human passion, as
even the filthy and inhuman asceticism of SS. Macarius and
Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and
deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or
in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling
expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine
sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendent
supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation
of naked nature as was possible to Titian. But Mr. Whitman's
Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the
slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her
overturned fruit-stall: but Mr. Whitman's Venus is a Hottentot
wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum."

Weighing the good and the bad, Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay
does not stint admiration nor withhold blame:

"He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes
instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged
and careless that it can only be described by saying that he
has not t