warm, and benignant personality of the man.  His volumes made up of articles in the Independent and the Ledger, such as Star Papers, 1855, and Eyes and Ears, 1862, contain 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 universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet.  Whether Whitman’s poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers