"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Shelley, who knew
what he was talking about when poetry was the subject, has said it, and
with a profundity of truth Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out
for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will one day be
potential or magisterial wherever the English language is spoken--that is
to say, in the four corners of the earth; and in his own American
hemisphere, the uttermost avatars of democracy will confess him not more
their announcer than their inspirer.

1868.
W. M. ROSSETTI.

_N.B._--The above prefatory notice was written in 1868, and is reproduced
practically unaltered. Were it to be brought up to the present date, 1886,
I should have to mention Whitman's books _Two Rivulets_ and _Specimen-days
and Collect_, and the fact that for several years past he has been
partially disabled by a paralytic attack. He now lives at Camden, New
Jersey.

1886.
W. M. R.




PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.


America does not repel the past, or what it has produced under its forms,
or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or the old religions;