though in a different way.  But with all his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of times and countries.  One likes to read him because he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the human race.  Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not many.  His indebtedness to Emerson—­who wrote an introduction to the Leaves of Grass—­is manifest.  He sings of man and not men, and the individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the dramatic elements of life, find small place in his system.  It is too early to say what will be his final position in literary history.  But it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet as their poet.  Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and feeling, are the darlings of the American people.  The admiration, and even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the literary class.  It is also not without significance as to the ultimate reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists, but no imitators.  The tendency among our younger poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the technique of their art.  It is observable, too, that in his most inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank verse, for example, in the Man-of-War-Bird: 

  “Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
  Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions,” etc.;

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters: 

  “Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . . 
  Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth.”

Indeed, Whitman’s most popular poem, My Captain, written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show: 

“My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! 
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck, my captain lies
Fallen, cold and dead.”

This is from Drum Taps, a volume of poems of the civil war.  Whitman has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry:  Democratic Vistas, Memoranda of the Civil War, and, more recently, Specimen Days.  His residence of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in 1876.

1.  William Cullen Bryant. Thanatopsis. To a Water-fowl. Green River. Hymn to the North Star. A Forest Hymn. “O Fairest of the Rural Maids.” June. The Death of the Flowers. The Evening Wind. The Battle-Field. The Planting of the Apple-tree. The Flood of Years.