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Org )) "Walt Whitman" ["Round the Table" feature]. Rose-Belford's Canadian Monthly and National Review, edited by Graeme Mercer Adam, George Stewart. (Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1880) vol 5, 94.

WALT WHITMAN.* ROUND THE TABLE. I BEGAN to read my friend's essay on 'Walt Whitman,' with a strong feeling of dissent from her estimate of his poetry. This was founded on the inadequate survey of his work afforded by Rosetti's 'expurgated' edition, then the only one within my reach. It was also founded on the often-repeated gibes of the Saturday Review, which, of late years, seems to have altered for the worse, to be as salt that has lost its savour, as vinegar unfit for the cruet. The Saturday has repeated again and again that Whitman is but a kind of rowdy Tupper, that his writings are full of gross indecencies. But then the Saturday has also delivered itself of the dictum that Leland's Hans Brietmann's ballads are destitute of humour, a critical verdict which, in my sincerest opinion, completely abolishes the authority of the court, and certainly Whitman's metrical form is like Tupper's. Tupper, the type of all that is most abjectly degraded in literature! But when I came to read the 'Leaves of Grass,' in the full undipped edition of 1872, the conclusion was very quickly formed, that Whitman is not as Tupper is. Whitman is all that Tupper is not,a poet, original, full of force and fire, ebullient with sympathy for human life, and for all life. His poetry finds one ; he is in the widest sense of the word, human, and republican ; his political teaching is that equality which is the creed of this our American continent, his religious philosophy, too, is that comprehensive and tolerant recognition of the correlation of all moral and religious forces, which, more or less understood and avowed, characterizes the vast imestablished Church of Free Opinion in America. My friend has so well set forth the true estimate of Whitman in this essay, which has at least made one convert, that I need add little. But two words may be permitted on Whitman's neglect of poetic form, and on what the Saturday calls ' indecencies.' In the tenth century, which Hallam says was the darkest of the dark ages, this unformed non-metrical rythm was introduced into the Latin Hymns of the Church by Notker; it was kept up by Gottechalk and others, and is the form of a groat proportion of the sequences preserved by Mone, Daniel, Neal, and Kehrein. It was, in fact, the revival of the poetical form of the Hebrew Psalms, a form which, in the conservative and unprogressing East, has never varied. In the Greek Church the Hymns are of this form, rhyme and metre never having been introduced. In the earlier Western Church, the Te

Deum, is the solitary specimen of this kind of composition until it was revived by Notker. With all its absence of form, how grandly flow the words of one at least of N otker's sequences, which few, who have heard its familiar version in a passage incorporated into the Burial Service of the Episcopal Church, recognize it as the work of a tenth century monk, "Media in Vita, sumus in Morte, quem ergo petimus adjutorem nisi Te Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris juste displiceris" 'In the midst of Life we are in death, of whom then may we seek succour but of Thee, Lord, who, for our sins art justly displeased.' This metre is then by no means incapable of lending itself to poetical thought; the facility which is its fault, makes it suited to the peculiarities of Whitman's rush and hurry of fancies, he has not time to stop and carve his meaning into metre, but to the ear that can hear, there is, as my friend says in her essay, a subtle music of rythm peculiar to this Poet and his subject. A word as to the other point. It is a delicate one to touch upon. Our Canadian Monthly, though it has always included among its contributors some daring assertors of Free Thought, has ever been a faithful exponent of morality. But the interest of Truth compels us to say that, as I find him, Walt Whitman is not immoral, that he is not even a sensuous painter of the human figure like Mr. Swinburne in the earlier volumes of that great poet. Walt Whitman is, before all things, a republican. He treats the subject of sex quite incidentally, by no means seeking it out or emphasizing it; but, when he does meet it, he is outspoken, as he is about everything else, and makes short work of conventional pruderies like the Hicksite iconoclast that he is.

* A Note on Mrs. K. Seymour Mac Lean's Essay, in the current number, by Charles Pelham Mulvany.