in whose case it is undoubtedly an inheritance from Walt Whitman, whom
he has lately acknowledged as his "pig-headed father." [Footnote:
_Lustra_.] A typical assertion is that in _Salutation the Second_,

How many will come after me,
Singing as well as I sing, none better.

There is a delicate charm in the self-assurance appearing in some of the
present verse, as Sara Teasdale's confidence in her "fragile
immortality" [Footnote: _Refuge._] or James Stephens' exultation in
_A Tune Upon a Reed,_

Not a piper can succeed
When I lean against a tree,
Blowing gently on a reed,

and in _The Rivals,_ where he boasts over a bird,

I was singing all the time,
Just as prettily as he,
About the dew upon the lawn,
And the wind upon the lea;
So I didn't listen to him
As he sang upon a tree.

If one were concerned only with this "not marble nor the gilded
monuments" theme, the sixteenth century would quite eclipse the
nineteenth or twentieth. But the egoism of our writers goes much further
than this parental satisfaction in their offspring. It seems to have
needed the intense individualism of Rousseau's philosophy, and of German