he result of something far greater than itself--not the hero but the
portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there
must be the transaction.' Certainly, in Walt Whitman's views there is a
largeness of vision, a healthy sanity and a fine ethical purpose. He is
not to be placed with the professional litterateurs of his country,
Boston novelists, New York poets and the like. He stands apart, and the
chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He
has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As
a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic
and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by,
Philosophy will take note of him.

_November Boughs_. By Walt Whitman. (Alexander Gardner.)

IRISH FAIRY TALES
(_Woman's World_, February 1889.)

'The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,' says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his
charming little book _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_,
'have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of
view of others, one great fault.'

They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us
of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of
mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To
be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales
in forms like grocers' bills--item the fairy king, item the queen.
Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the
very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.
Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility,
saw everything humorized. The impulse of the Irish literature of
their time came from a class that did not--mainly for political
reasons--take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a
humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew
nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely
magnified an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen,
carmen, and gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation,
and created the stage Irishman. The writers of 'Forty-eight, and the
famine combined, burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well
as the shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is
touched everywhere with beauty--a gentle Arcadian beaut