ts, but because he has the quality of things in the
open air, the quality of the unhoused, the untamed, the elemental and
aboriginal. He pleases and he offends, the same way things at large do. He
has the brawn, the indifference, the rudeness, the virility, the
coarseness,--something gray, unpronounced, elemental, about him, the
effect of mass, size, distance, flowing, vanishing lines, neutral
spaces,--something informal, multitudinous, and processional,--something
regardless of criticism, that makes no bid for our applause, not
calculated instantly to please, unmindful of details, prosaic if we make
it so, common, near at hand, and yet that provokes thought and stirs our
emotions in an unusual degree. The long lists and catalogues of objects
and scenes in Whitman, that have so excited the mirth of the critics, are
one phase of his out-of-doors character,--a multitude of concrete objects,
a grove, a thicket, a field, a stretch of beach,--every object sharply
defined, but no attempt at logical or artistic sequence, the effect of the
whole informal, multitudinous. It may be objected to these pages that they
consist of a mass of details that do not make a picture. But every line is
a picture of a scene or an object. Whitman always keeps up the movement,
he never pauses to describe; it is all action.

Passing from such a poet as Tennyson to Whitman is like going from a warm,
perfumed interior, with rich hangings, pictures, books, statuary, fine men
and women, out into the street, or upon the beach, or upon the hill, or
under the midnight stars. We lose something certainly, but do we not gain
something also? Do we not gain just what Whitman had in view, namely,
direct contact with the elements in which are the sources of our life and
health? Do we not gain in scope and power what we lose in art and
refinement?

The title, "Leaves of Grass," is full of meaning. What self-knowledge and
self-scrutiny it implies! The grass, perennial sprouting, universal,
formless, common, the always spread feast of the herds, dotted with
flowers, the herbage of the earth, so suggestive of the multitudinous,
loosely aggregated, unelaborated character of the book; the lines
springing directly out of the personality of the poet, the soil of his
life.

"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is me,"

says the poet, and this turns out to be the case. We only look to see if
in the common and the cheap he discloses new values and new meani