and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jest, and irony itself -do these things go out with life? Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him? And you, my midnight darlings, my folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by the familiar process of reading? Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here-the recognisable face- the 'sweet assurance of a look- —?' ''

He has risen now, and breaks off with a gesture and a smile of winsome pathos; and the little band silently separates. Not often does their host so unlock the treasures of his heart.

More than criticism, I think, we need the impression of such scenes as this on our mind; we need to know how Lamb lived with these friends, and how in their society and in the scarcely less human companionship of books he made for himself a refuge, an evasion, if you will, from the realities of life. For we do not go to his Essays and Letters primarily for transcendence of intellect or creative genius, but for this spirit of illusory friendliness that runs through them all, lending to our mortal cloak of frailties and humilities a beauty that is almost a beatitude. The material for this knowledge Mr. Lucas has

given us in generous abundance, and, so doing, has brought Lamb a little nearer to us than he was before.

WALT WHITMAN

IT is ill dealing with the prophets. They themselves may be approachable, serene, and simple, but about them their disciples soon cast such a mirage of words that the seeker is blinded and baffled, if he is not utterly repelled. And denying what the disciples say, one fears the rebuke of denying the great principles whose names they usurp. You may read in Mr. Burroughs or Mr. O'Connor or Dr. Bucke and feel so strong a repulsion for their idol that only a copious draught direct from the Leaves of Grass or the Specimen Days will restore your mind to equilibrium. Yet it is fair now to add that, by eliminating himself and allowing Whitman to speak his own words, Mr. Horace Traubel, certainly one of the least tolerable of these enthusiasts, has given us a book of some importance,' a daily record of intercourse during four months with his master, when old and paralytic and waiting for the outward tide.

Here we may meet the "good grey poet" just

1 With Walt Whitman in Camden. (March 28-July 14, 1888.) By Horace Traubel. Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1906.

as he was in his little house in Mickle Street, Camden; may sit with him in his chamber in the midst of its indescribable confusion, and hear him talk, "garrulous to the very last." "There is all sorts of débris scattered about," says the diary, "bits of manuscript, letters, newspapers, books. Near by his elbow towards the window a washbasket filled with such stuff. Lady Mount Temple's waistcoat [a gift to Whitman from England] was thrown carelessly on the motley table-a Blake volume was used by him for a footstool: near by a copy of De Kay's poems given by Gilder to Rhys. Various other books. A Dickens under his elbow on the chair. He pushed the books here and there several times this evening in his hunt for particular papers. This,' he said once,

'is not so much a mess as it looks: you notice that I find most of the things I look for and without much trouble.' " As a matter of fact, his usual method of hunting was to rummage with his stick among the papers on the floor until the desired object came to the surface. Meanwhile, what other chance treasures floated up!-letters from Tennyson, Symonds, Roden Noel, Lord Houghton, Dowden, and many another stout admirer across the sea, all which were passed over to Mr. Traubel and by him duly transcribed for our perusal. What will surprise most readers of the diary is the predominance of this bookish talk; and, except where his own work is concerned, Whitman shows himself a trenchant and just

critic-as might be inferred from his essays on Carlyle and Burns. One could wish that he did not so often fall into the trick common among the ill-educated of denouncing criticism while themselves exercising that function. It was, for example, not gracious to complain of Mr. Stedman for weighing him in the critical balance, when he himself was subjecting writer after writer to the same process. And again, in a larger sense, though we may after a fashion understand his distinction, there is almost a touch of insincerity in the constant segregation of himself from literature and the literary class. After all, a book's a book however much there's in 't, and the whole ambition of Whitman's life was in his authorship. More than that, we remember how many times in the Leaves of Grass he declares that the justification of America shall be her poets; and what student of the closet would have dared, as he did in his lecture on the Death of Abraham Lincoln, to reduce the whole desperate terror of the war to the needs of the literary imagination ?—

I say, certain secondary and indirect results, out of the tragedy of this death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not the event of the murder itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln strings the principal points and personages of the period, like beads, upon the single thread of his career. Not that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and disappearance, stamps this republic with a stamp more mark'd and enduring than any yet given by any one man -(more even than Washington's;)—but, join'd with these, the immeasurable value and meaning of that whole