terly and dramatic description
of the tragic life of the Irish peasant. Literature is not much indebted
to Mr. Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt which is
one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending
Mr. Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and
deep-thinking poet. The narrow confines of the prison cell seem to suit
the 'sonnet's scanty plot of ground,' and an unjust imprisonment for a
noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.

In Vinculis. By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Author of The Wind and the
Whirlwind, The Love Sonnets of Proteus, etc. etc. (Kegan Paul.)

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WALT WHITMAN

(Pall Mall Gazette, January 25, 1889.)

'No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary
performance . . . or as aiming mainly toward art and aestheticism.'
'Leaves of Grass . . . has mainly been the outcropping of my own
emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to
put _a Person_, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I
could not find any similar personal record in current literature that
satisfied me.' In these words Walt Whitman gives us the true attitude we
should adopt towards his work, having, indeed, a much saner view of the
value and meaning of that work than either his eloquent admirers or noisy
detractors can boast of possessing. His last book, November Boughs, as
he calls it, published in the winter of the old man's life, reveals to
us, not indeed a soul's tragedy, for its last note is one of joy and
hope, and noble and unshaken faith in all that is fine and worthy of such
faith, but certainly the drama of a human soul, and puts on record with a
simplicity that has in it both sweetness and strength the record of his
spiritual development, and of the aim and motive both of the manner and
the matter of his work. His strange mode of expression is shown in these
pages to have been the result of deliberate and self-conscious choice.
The 'barbaric yawp' which he sent over 'the roofs of the world' so many
years ago, and which wrung from Mr. Swinburne's lip such lofty panegyric
in song and such loud clamorous censure in prose, appears here in what
will be to many an entirely new light. For in his very rejection of art
Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by
certain m