One of Mr. Emerson’s biographers has claimed that his Phi Beta Kappa Oration was our Declaration of Literary Independence.  But Mr. Emerson did not cut himself loose from all the traditions of Old World scholarship.  He spelled his words correctly, he constructed his sentences grammatically.  He adhered to the slavish rules of propriety, and observed the reticences which a traditional delicacy has considered inviolable in decent society, European and Oriental alike.  When he wrote poetry, he commonly selected subjects which seemed adapted to poetical treatment,—­apparently thinking that all things were not equally calculated to inspire the true poet’s genius.  Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to “the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan,” but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment.  He was not always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as regulating both.  In short, with all his originality, he worked in Old World harness, and cannot be considered as the creator of a truly American, self-governed, self-centred, absolutely independent style of thinking and writing, knowing no law but its own sovereign will and pleasure.

A stronger claim might be urged for Mr. Whitman.  He takes into his hospitable vocabulary words which no English dictionary recognizes as belonging to the language,—­words which will be looked for in vain outside of his own pages.  He accepts as poetical subjects all things alike, common and unclean, without discrimination, miscellaneous as the contents of the great sheet which Peter saw let down from heaven.  He carries the principle of republicanism through the whole world of created objects.  He will “thread a thread through [his] poems,” he tells us, “that no one thing in the universe is inferior to another thing.”  No man has ever asserted the surpassing dignity and importance of the American citizen so boldly and freely as Mr. Whitman.  He calls himself “teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism.”  He begins one of his chants, “I celebrate myself,” but he takes us all in as partners in his self-glorification.  He believes in America as the new Eden.

“A world primal again,—­vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, New politics—­new literature and religions—­new inventions and arts.”

Of the new literature be himself has furnished specimens which certainly have all the originality he can claim for them.  So far as egotism is concerned, he was clearly anticipated by the titled personage to whom I have referred, who says of himself, “I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western world.”  But while Mr. Whitman divests himself of a part of his baptismal name, the distinguished New Englander