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[228] and yet who resolutely confine themselves to a few very simple stage properties, and substitute mere cadence for form. There was for many years an Ossianic period, when simple enthusiasts sat up at night and read until they were sleepy about the waving of the long grass on the blasted heath, and the passing of the armed warrior and the whitebosomed maiden. Ossian is not so much read now, but Napoleon Bonaparte admired him and Goethe studied him. Neither is Tupper now much cultivated; but I remember when his long rambling lines were copied by the page into many extract books, and that he too was welcomed as relieving mankind from the tiresome restraints of verse. It would be a great mistake, doubtless, to class Whitman with Ossian on the one side,--though he names him with Shakespeare among the writers whom he studied in youth,--or Tupper on the other; but it would be a still greater error to overlook the fact that the mere revolt against the tyranny of form has been made again and again before him, and without securing immortal fame to the author of the experiment. It is no uncommon thing, moreover, for
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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