Liberty has received from the publishers, and joyfully welcomes Leaves of Grass, the collective title of Walt Whitman's poems. It is a convenient, compact, and tastefully "got up" volume of 382 pages, and contains a number of hitherto unpublished poems, besides those of the earlier editions. Leaves of Grass have lost nothing of their original native simplicity, freshness, and vigor from being more carefully arranged and placed in a more artistic, though it may be a more conventional vase. The book will be more readily purchased and read, at any rate; and that is the main point. The titles of some of the poems have been changed, and the table of contents newly arranged and made much more convenient for reference to special passages.
We have not discovered that the book has lost anything of its characteristic outspoken independence, nor that any concession has been made to Mrs. Grundy. It still retains all its naked truthfulness and purity, like its prototype in marble, the Greek Slave.
Walt Whitman is preeminently, above all and before all, the poet of innovation, the poet of change, the poet of growth, the poet of evolution. There is not a drop of stagnant blood in his veins. Every fibre of him quivers with life, energy, and fire. His spirit is at the same time the spirit of content and discontent. He is satisfied with whatever is and as it is - for to-day, but not for to-morrow, nor that for any future tomorrow.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.That seems to him to be the key-note of the universe.
A study, "By Blue Ontario's Shore," affords a good idea of what he himself considers his mission, and shows how thoroughly one in purpose that mission is with Liberty's. He shall speak for himself from that poem.
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