se in the country
was ever found who felt or acted like this.

In fact, in all that concerns the human relations Walt Whitman is as
unreal as, let us say, William Morris, and the American mechanic would
probably prefer Sigurd the Volsung, and understand it better than
Whitman's poetry.

This falseness to the sentiment of the American is interwoven with such
wonderful descriptions of American sights and scenery, of ferryboats,
thoroughfares, cataracts, and machine-shops that it is not strange the
foreigners should have accepted the gospel.

On the whole, Whitman, though he solves none of the problems of life and
throws no light on American civilization, is a delightful appearance,
and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. This man committed
every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole life was
an outrage. He was neither chaste, nor industrious, nor religious. He
patiently lived upon cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph.

He did really live the life he liked to live, in defiance of all men,
and this is a great desert, a most stirring merit. And he gave, in his
writings, a true picture of himself and of that life,--a picture which
the world had never seen before, and which it is probable the world will
not soon cease to wonder at.

* * * * *

A STUDY OF ROMEO

The plays of Shakespeare marshal themselves in the beyond. They stand in
a place outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is greater than our
philosophy. They are like the forces of nature and the operations of
life in the vivid world about us. We may measure our intellectual growth
by the new horizons we see opening within them. So long as they continue
to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony
and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. At the
moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as
stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning
to petrify. Our fresh interest in life has been arrested. There is,
therefore, danger in an attempt to "size up" Shakespeare. We cannot help
setting down as a coxcomb any man who has done it to his own
satisfaction. He has pigeon-holed himself. He will not get lost. If you
want him, you can lay your hand on him. He has written an autobiography.
He has "sized up" himself.

In writing about Shakespeare, it is excusable to put off the armor