intelligence, or else stiff prejudice, who is not interested
by Whitman's matter and the spirit it represents. Not as a
poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more exact
expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or
not, he is a notable symptom of the present. As a sign of
the times, it would be hard to find his parallel. I should
hazard a large wager, for instance, that he was not
unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet
where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on
two more incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous
- I had almost said, so dandy - in dissent; and Whitman, like
a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of
the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo more
curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his
Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of
the Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman?


I.


Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a
system. He was a theoriser about society before he was a
poet. He first perceived something wanting, and then sat
down squarely to supply the want. The reader, running over
his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in
critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the
spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory