poetry, so far as poetry existed, he would recognize a somewhat feeble
imitation of English poetry. The newspaper verses very fairly represent
the average talent for poetry and average appreciation of it, and the
newspaper verse of the United States is precisely what one would expect
from a decorous and unimaginative population,--intelligent,
conservative, and uninspired.

Above the newspaper versifiers float the minor poets, and above these
soar the greater poets; and the characteristics of the whole hierarchy
are the same as those of the humblest acolyte,--intelligence,
conservatism, conventional morality.

Above the atmosphere they live in, above the heads of all the American
poets, and between them and the sky, float the Constitution of the
United States and the traditions and forms of English literature.

This whole culture is secondary and tertiary, and it truly represents
the respectable mediocrity from which it emanates. Whittier and
Longfellow have been much read in their day,--read by mill-hands and
clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and doctors and divines, by the
reading classes of the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke for,
whose yearnings and spiritual life they truly expressed.

Now, the Oxford traveller would not have found Whitman at all. He would
never have met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a man like him.

The traveller, as he opened his Saturday Review upon his return to
London, and read the current essay on Whitman, would have been faced by
a problem fit to puzzle Montesquieu, a problem to floor Goethe.