REVIEWS — LEAVES OF GRASS. 547 



by a sheaf of double-columned extracts from Reviews— not always the 

 least curious of its singular contents. Here, for example, is a protest 

 against the intrusion of the British muse on the free soil of the States 

 of the Union, which must surely satisfy the most clamant demand for 

 native poetics and republican egotism : 



" What very properly fits a subject of the British crown, may fit 

 very ill an American freeman. No fine romance, no inimitable de- 

 lineation of character, no grace of delicate illustrations, no rare pic- 

 ture of shore or mountain or sky, no deep thought of the intellect, is 

 so important to a man a3 his opinion of himself is ; everything re- 

 ceives its tinge from that. In the verse of all those undoubtedly 

 great writers, Shakespeare, just, as much as the rest, there is the air 

 which to America is the air of death. The mass of the people, the labor- 

 ers and all who serve, are slag, refuse. The countenances of kings 

 and great lords are beautiful ; the countenances of mechanics are 

 ridiculous and deformed. "What play of Shakespeare represented in 

 America, is not an insult to America, to the marrow in its bones r 

 How can the tone — never sileut in their plots and characters — be ap- 

 plauded, unless Washington should have been caught and hung, and 

 Jefferson was the most enormous of liars, and common persons, North 

 and South, should bow low to their betters, and to organic superior- 

 ity of blood ? Sure a3 the heavens envelop the earth, if the Ameri- 

 cans want a race of bards worthy of 1855, and of the stern reality of 

 this republic, they must cast around for men essentially different 

 from the old poets, and from the modern successions of jinglers and 

 snivellers and fops." — and here accordingly is something essentially dif- 

 ferent from all poets, both old and new. 



The poet, unnamed on his title page, figures on his frontispiece, 

 and unmistakeably utters his own poem: 



" I celebrate myself, 



And what I assume, you shall assume ; 



For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 



I loafe, and invite my soul ; 



I lean and loafe at ray ease — 



Observing a spear of Summer grass." 



Such is the starting point of this most eccentric and republican of 

 poets ; of whom the republican critic above quoted, after contrasting 

 with him Tennyson, as " The bard of ennui, and the aristocracy and 

 their combination into love, the old stock love of playwrights and ro- 

 mancers, Shakespeare, the same as the rest, " — concludes by confess- 

 ing his inability to decide whether Walt Whitman is " to provo the 



