many delightful
_morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly
wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in
letters. Like Willis's _Ephemera_ they are excellent literary
journalism, but hardly literature.

We may close our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a
brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the
time--the _Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in
1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been
printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good
deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention,
but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a vehicle for
his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant,
of which the following is a fair specimen:

"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the few large stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!"

The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of
the psalms of David and of some of the prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_,
and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed
Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the
old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases
attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to
the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which
was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures
and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom.
There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his
so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of
prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation
and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few
literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like
Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have
something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing
else--in writings from this side of the water, before they will
acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering
in Whitman "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he is the
greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is
"cosmic," or univers