Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me. Why These are the children of the antique to justify it. Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it) Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves, Regarding it all intensely a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place with my own day here.' We are warned, however, that our space is already exhausted, and can refer to but one other of the many remaining features of Whitman's poetry. After pointing out that formerly he was considered the best poet who composed the most perfect work, or the one which was most complete in every respect, Sainte-Beuve has remarked that for us in the present the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection; not he who has done the best, but he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn.' Judged by this standard Whitman deserves to take a place among the foremost. His works are preeminently suggestive. Any finished picture he seldom presents. His poems are rather suggestions, arousing the reader, and leading him on and on, till he feels the fresher air of a freer thought breathing around him, and sees spreading out before him the limitless and unknown. 'I but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.' probably be taken as significant of the tendency of American thought. Whitman is pre-eminently a poet of the modern world. No other has more thoroughly adopted the conclusions of science, or made a more splendid and impressive use of them in his writings. Not unseldom they give a vastness and grandeur to his thought, which is well-nigh overwhelming. At the same time he is very far from being in any sense or degree a materialist. The supremacy of the spiritual he always loyally, and sometimes ostentatiously, recognises. Though almost Greek in his sympathy with nature, and notwithstanding the manner in which he has sung of man's physical constitution, the position which he assigns to the soul is always incomparably higher, as the following from his Preface of 1876 clearly shows :— 'Only (for me, at anyrate, in all my prose and poetry), joyfully accepting modern science, and loyally following it without the slightest hesitation, there remains ever recognized still a higher flight, a higher fact, the eternal soul of man, (of all else too) the spiritual the religious-which it is to be the greatest office of scientism, in my opinion, and of future poetry also, to free from fables, crudities, and superstitions, and launch forth in renewed faith and scope a hundred-fold. To me, the worlds of religiousness, of the conception of the divine, and of the ideal, though mainly latent, are just as absolute in humanity and the universe as the world of chemistry, or anything in the objective worlds. . . . To me the crown of savantism is to be, that it surely opens the way for a more splendid theology, and for ampler and diviner songs.' The Still, notwithstanding his modern tone of thought, and the democratic spirit which pervades his writings, the past is by no means disdained by Whitman. Past, present, and future, he holds, are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been. present, he affirms, is but a stage in the eternal process of creative thought, and is what it is through the past. At the same time, however, while admitting his indebtedness to the past, and claiming kinship with it, he asserts also his independence, and claims to stand in his own place with his own day about him : 'I conn'd old times, Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me. Why These are the children of the antique to justify it. Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it) than it deserves, Regarding it all intensely a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place with my own day here.' We are warned, however, that our space is already exhausted, and can refer to but one other of the many remaining features of Whitman's poetry. After pointing out that formerly he was considered the best poet who composed the most perfect work, or the one which was most complete in every respect, Sainte-Beuve has remarked that for us in the present the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection; not he who has done the best, but he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn.' Judged by this standard Whitman deserves to take a place among the foremost. His works are preeminently suggestive. Any finished picture he seldom presents. His poems are rather suggestions, arousing the reader, and leading him on and on, till he feels the fresher air of a freer thought breathing around him, and sees spreading out before him the limitless and unknown. 'I but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.' writings we have already referred; and our assertions on this point have been borne out by several of the passages we have cited for other purposes. Did our space permit, numerous other passages might be cited as bearing directly upon it. But as a last word, and as indicating with considerable fulness the scope and spirit of all that he has written, we transcribe the follow-ing: 'And thou America, For the scheme's culmination, its thought and its reality For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived. "Thou, too, surroundest all, Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, thou, too, by pathways broad and new, To the ideal tendest. 'The measur'd faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past, Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own, Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all, 'All for immortality, Love like the light silently wrapping all, Nature's amelioration blessing all, The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain, 'Give me, O God, to sing that thought, Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith, In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us, Health, peace, salvation, universal. 'Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream? And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream. ' ART. VI.-ZOLA'S PARISIAN MIDDLE CLASSES. WHEN Emile Zola, in the course of his Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire, had pourtrayed the labouring classes of Paris in a description which may or may not have been a calumny, he is said to have promised them their revenge, and his representation of commercial society has certainly been envenomed enough to gratify the most vindictive prolétaire. It may be questioned whether the author lays the greater stress upon the representation of foul animalism, or upon that of an almost utter absence of any sentiment of honour, honesty, or self-respect. By the inculpated class itself the work was greeted with screams of horror at its impropriety. It is certainly coarse almost beyond expression, and contains one description in particular which ought never to have been written by any man born of woman. But when one calls to remembrance the complacency with which the same people perused the sickening account of degradation among working men, in one volume of the series, and the equally revolting picture of aristocratic debaucheries in another, their qualms of delicacy are apt to remind one of the conscientious objections to Ritualism which suddenly developed themselves in some persons doing business in London when Brother Ignatius had delivered in a city church one or two of his course of sermons on the text Thou shalt not steal.' Zola is certainly no instance of the Divine truth that 'Fools make a mock at sin.' The vice so nakedly described is painted in the blackest and most repulsive colours, and the vicious types who form nearly all his dramatis persona are held up only to contempt and dislike. Of the few upright or moral characters, the old man Vabre, the secret gambler, is drawn chiefly for amusement; but the poor struggling and wellmeaning father, M. Josserand, is evidently meant to excite pity and sympathy, if not actual respect; and the highest place is kept for the ecclesiastic, torn between the fear of condoning wickedness on the one hand and of rendering his |