BEVLEWS — LEAVES OE GBASS. 549 



Growing among black folks as among white, 



Kanuek, Tuckahoe, Congressmen, Cuff, 



I give them the same, I receive them the same. 



And now it seems to me the beautiful uncat hair of graves. 



All truths wait in all things, 



They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, 



They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, 



The insignificant is as big to me as any, 



What is less or more than a touch '. 



Logic and sermons never convince, 



The damp of the night chives deeper into my soul. 



I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the jourueywork of the stars, 



And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of 



the wren, 

 And the tree-toad is a chef-d'ceuvre for the highest, 

 And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, 

 And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, 

 And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue, 

 And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." 



This passage is far from being the most characteristic of the poem, 



and even in it we have stopped abruptly for one line more, and 



Tet this will show that the punctuation is as odd as any other feature 

 of the work ; for the whole is full of conceits which speak fully as 

 much of coarse vain-glorious egotism as of originality of genius. 

 Any man may be an original, whether in the fopperies of the dress he 

 puts on himself or on his poem. "We are not, therefore, disposed to 

 rate such very high, or to reckon Walt Whitman's typographical 

 whims any more indicative of special genius, than the shirt-sleeves and 

 unshaven chin of his frontispiece. If they indicate any thing 

 specially, we should infer that he is a compositor by trade, and, for 

 all his affectations of independence, could not keep "the shop" out 

 of his verse. But that he sets all the ordinary rules of men and 

 poets at defiance is visible on every page of his lank volume ; and if 

 readers judge thereby that he thinks himself wiser than all previous 

 men and poets— we have no authority to contradict them. That some 

 of his thoughts are far from vain or common place, however, a few 

 gleanings may suffice to prove ; culled in the form, not of detached 

 passages but of isolated ideas, — lines, or fragments of lines : — 



" The friendly and flowing savage. . . .Who is he ? 

 Is he waiting fir civilization or past it and mastering it?" 



'• The welcome ugly face of some beautiful Botil." 



