194 BIRDS AND POETS 
called Whitman’s want of art, or his violation of 
art. I saw that he at once designedly swept away 
all which the said critics have commonly meant by 
that term. The dominant impression was of the 
living presence and voice. He would have no cur- 
tains, he said, not the finest, between himself and 
his reader; and in thus bringing me face to face 
with his subject I perceived he not only did not 
escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged, 
enfranchised art in this very abnegation of art. 
“When half-gods go, whole gods arrive.” It was 
obvious to me that the new style gained more than 
it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching 
forth of the voice, though it sounded strangely at 
first, and required the ear to get used to it, there 
might be quite as much science, and a good deal 
more power, than in the tuneful but constricted 
measures we were accustomed to. 
To the eye the page of the new poet presented 
about the same contrast with the page of the popu- 
lar poets that trees and the free, unbidden growths 
of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to 
the spirit the contrast was about the same. The 
hedge is the more studiedly and obviously beauti- 
ful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfac- 
tion in trees that one would not care to lose. There 
are symmetry and proportion in the sonnet, but to 
me there is something I would not exchange for 
them in the wild swing and balance of many free 
and unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the 
one, for instance, in which these lines occur: — 
