"Whitman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life if this life that we are now in is not it. When the time comes for them to stop their labours here, they look forward without fear and with anticipation to the change, the transition to the other form of life—but not to any other life. The words of Whitman embody a spirit of anticipation ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... But Whitman, thou Donkey, never weeps. Whitman, if that goblin tried to silence him, would have wrung his neck, after he had ridden upon it. The above, nevertheless, deserves the space we give it here, as it shadows forth one of the essential elements of Khalid's spiritual make-up. But this slight ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my mind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations and meanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate nature is. The trees are wrapped in a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... vagabond streak that took him into the woods and the hills for days at a time. About the middle of his Sophomore year he discovered Whitman. While camping alone at night under the stars he ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... fool," said Philip. "But surely Walt Whitman must have understood for he said it all in verse. 'I am to wait, I do not doubt, I am to meet you again,'" quoted Philip under his breath; "'I am to see to it that I ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... work unfinished. Yet I would not speak specially of him, lest modern critics should run away with their mad notion of a one-man influence; and call this a "school" of Francis Thompson. Francis Thompson was not a schoolmaster. He would have said as freely as Whitman (and with a far more consistent philosophy), "I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free." The modern world has this mania about plagiarism because the modern world cannot comprehend the idea ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... prepares his mind for writing by sleeping with his head encased in a nightcap lined with leaves of lavender and rose. GRANT, it is said, accomplishes most of his writing while under the influence of either opium or chloroform, which will account for the soothing character of his state papers. WALT WHITMAN writes most of his poetry in the dissecting-room of the Medical College, where he has a desk fitted up in close proximity to the operating table. Mr. DANA is said to write most of his editorials in one of the parlors of the Manhattan Club, arrayed in black broadcloth ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... affairs. When it comes to action, all the finest words ever spoken, and all the most beautiful poems and books ever written, seem so irrelevant, as Hilda Wangel said of reading. "How beggarly all arguments appear before a defiant deed!" cried Walt Whitman. "Every man," said Ruskin, "feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world count less than a single lovely action." The powerlessness of the word—that, as I said, has been the burden of speakers and writers. That is what drove Dante to politics, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... denounced by priest and publican as a subverter of morals. No poet, no demagogue, had ever so interested the masses. Musicians of academic training held aloof. What had they in common with this charlatan who treated the abominable teachings of Walt Whitman symphonically? He could not be a respectable man, even if he were a sane. And then the unlettered tiller of the soil, drunken mechanic and gutter drab all loved his music. What kind of music was it thus to ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... within the memory of men still living, the lumbering, white-topped "prairie schooner'' was the only conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California. Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi Valley, and the bold Whitman was "half a year'' in bearing a message from Oregon ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... same effect upon his nerves as the sound of the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by music. He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from sickness. Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and more vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti felt the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth. 'On old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed again and again, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Western pictures and the Western library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history of Eastern and Western mysticism. An armful of books about Blake and Boehme, all Swedenborg, all Carlyle, all Emerson, all Whitman, all Shelley, all Maeterlinck, all Francis Thompson, and all Tagore, and plenty of other complete editions; early Christian mystics; much of William Law, Bergson, Eucken, Caird, James, Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Jefferies, Havelock Ellis, Carpenter, Strindberg, "AE," Yeats, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... more direct contrast with the writer's prose, and show that the poetry is inherent. No other poet, with whom I am acquainted, has caused the very spirit of a land, the mother of men, to express itself so adequately as Emerson has done in these pieces. Whitman falls short of them, it seems to me, though his effort ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... career. Pierpont Morgan's attitude toward his biography (if, in spite of his reticence, it became one of the necessities—even one of the industrial necessities, of the world that he should have one) was probably a good deal the attitude of Walt Whitman when he told Traubel, "Whatever you do with me, don't prettify me"; and if there were things in Mr. Morgan's career which he imperturbably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man not to try to help people to find out what they are. But living has been to Mr. Morgan ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... an abiding-place. The surroundings of the hotel were dangerously charming to a man whose natural inclination was towards indolent enjoyment. It was a place to "Loaf and invite your soul," as Walt Whitman phrases it. Plonville, who was there incognito, for he had temporarily dropped the "De," strolled towards the sea in the afternoon, with the air of one who has nothing on his mind. No one to see him would have suspected he was the future Edison of France. When he reached ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... seemed assured, but it wasn't! One day when he was with William Nicholson, the clever artist and one of the Beggarstaff Brothers of poster fame, he began chipping at a woodblock in imitation of Nicholson, and produced in a few hours an admirable wood-cut of Walt Whitman, then and always his particular hero. From that moment he had the "black and white" fever badly. Acting for a time seemed hardly to interest him at all. When his interest in the theater revived, it was not as an actor but as a stage director that ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... as highly as the "swopping, swopping mallard" of a comfortable college in Oxford. As to the wild turkey, the poet has not yet risen in America who can do justice to the charms of that admirable bird. Mr. Whitman, who has much to say about "bob-a-links" and "whip-poor-wills," and some other fowl which sing "when lilacs bloom in the garden yard," has neglected, we fear, the wild turkey, simply because the Muse has not given this bird melody, and made ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the convincing wit and clear criticism of my illustrious departed friend, James Russell Lowell, the Catullus-like perfection of the lyrics of Edgar Allan Poe, and the glorious, large-tempered dithyrambs of Walt Whitman. ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... volume of poems, happily entitled Airs from Arcady. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the cleverest is called "Home, Sweet Home, with Variations." He writes the poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... bench, and that a new one, for the little market place was empty at that hour, and he had lately, for the rest, been much alone. He was not unhappy, for he resembled his great countryman, Walt Whitman, in carrying a kind of universe with him like an open umbrella; but he was not only alone, but lonely. For Ashe had gone abruptly up to London, and since his return had been occupied obscurely with legal matters, doubtless bearing on the murder. And Treherne had long since taken up his position openly, ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... the love affairs of Chip and Delia Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... more of horsemen and pack-train drivers, among whom rode a short sturdy young man, the future martyr-missionary, Marcus Whitman, moved on, browned, gaunt, dust-begrimed, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Happy Hour's Command Answer to an Insisting Friend Genealogy—Van Velsor and Whitman The Old Whitman and Van Velsor Cemeteries The Maternal Homestead Two Old Family Interiors Paumanok, and my Life on it as Child and Young Man My First Reading—Lafayette Printing Office—Old Brooklyn Growth—Health—Work My Passion for Ferries Broadway Sights Omnibus ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... continued, turning to me and puffing at his pipe, "so you warn Grayson and me that we must prepare to relinquish these and all the other delights sung by Lefroy and Norman Gale and that other poet—anonymous, but you know the man—in his incomparable parody of Whitman: 'the perfect ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... critics who would unite in condemning a thirteen-line sonnet or a ten-act tragedy could not be expected to agree on the relative merits of Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets. Unanimity of opinion is as impossible and undesirable concerning the poetic achievement of Browning and Whitman as it is concerning the music of Brahms and Wagner, or the painting of Turner and Whistler. Great artists who have taken liberties with traditions and precedents have done much to prevent the critics from falling into a state ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... and critics who have recognized the value of his work. His growing fame found a notable expression when his picture appeared in the frontispiece of the standard American Anthology, along with those of Poe, Walt Whitman, and the five recognized New ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... himself as a star reporter on The Press, and was already known as a clever news-gatherer and interviewer. It was in reply to a letter that Richard wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson enclosing an interview he had had with Walt Whitman, that Stevenson wrote the following letter—which my brother always regarded as one of ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... his heart, except the political and patriotic exhortation which he poured out. He passed a part of the summer with his daughter, Mrs. Derby, on the coast of Maine; and in the early autumn, at Carnegie Hall, he made his last public speech, in behalf of Governor Whitman's candidacy. A little after this, he appeared for the last time in public at a meeting in honor of a negro hospital unit. In a few days another outbreak of the old infection caused his removal to the Roosevelt Hospital. The date was November 11th,—the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... arm. "Listen!" he commanded. "Matrimony and Art are sworn and natural foes. Ingeborg Bunck was right; there are no illegitimate children; all children are valid. Sounds like Lope de Vega, doesn't it? But it isn't. It is Bunck. Whitman, too, divined the truth. Love is a germ; sunlight kills it. It needs l'obscurite and a high temperature. As Baudelaire said—or was it Maurice Barres?—dans la nuit tous les chats sont gris. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... teachers of mankind, this distinction between good and evil has been fundamental. They have not invented it as a theory on which to base religion, but they have found it in human life, one and all of them. If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the difference between virtue and vice, and do honour to the courtesan, it simply means that they are bad thinkers, bad observers. The deeper minds see more clearly and escape the confusion into ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... out to help in forming it. War on a national scale was something entirely new to both sides, and especially unwelcome to many people in the North, though the really loyal North was up at Lincoln's call. Then came Bull Run; and Lincoln's renewed determination, so well expressed in Whitman's words: "The President, recovering himself, begins that very night—sternly, rapidly sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in positions for future and surer work. If there was nothing else of Abraham Lincoln ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... over! They returned to that Rectory an engaged couple. They were made for each other.—Same tastes, same sentiments. They love the same things—gardens scenery, the simple life, lofty ideals, cathedrals and Walt Whitman." ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... that our most indigenous art has reacted upon the art of older nations. Besides Poe—who, though indigenous in ways too subtle for brief analysis, yet passed all frontiers in his swift, sad flight—the two American artists of widest influence, Whitman and Whistler, have been intensely American in temperament and in the special spiritual ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... instruments of the Cosmic law. The true poet and the maker of rhymes. The mission and scope of the poetical temperament. How "temperament" affects expression. No royal road to Illumination. Teaching of Oriental mysticism. Whitman's extraordinary experience. His idea of "Perfections." Lord Tennyson's two distinct states of consciousness; his early boyhood and strange experiences. Facts about his illumination. The after effects. Tennyson's vision of the future. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... says, 'I wud stand beside wan iv these r-rough men threatin' him as a akel, which he was in ivrything but birth, education, rank an' courage, an' together we wud look up at th' admirable stars iv that tolerable southern sky an' quote th' bible fr'm Walt Whitman,' he says. 'Honest, loyal, thrue-hearted la-ads, how kind I was to thim,' ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... "did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen—something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.' Did you ever ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... into French the history of Nadir Shah. From the Arabic he also translated many pieces, and among them the Seven Poems suspended in the temple at Mecca, which, in their subjects and style, seem an Arabic anticipation of Walt Whitman. He wrote in Latin a Book of Commentaries on Asiatic Poetry, in English several works on the Mohammedan and Civil Law, with a translation of the Greek Orations of Isaeus. As a lawyer, a judge, a student of natural history, his ardor of study was equally apparent. He presented to ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... paper, all the ink, all the labour, all the mental effort and sympathy and love seem a bagatelle when we look through the bibliographies and realize how much paper, ink, effort—not always to be called mental—sympathy and love have been used up in expounding Wagner's philosophy. The cases of Whitman and Browning make a poor show compared with this case. I believe there are still some human beings who turn for guidance to Wagner the philosopher. Later I shall be compelled to say something about ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... greater part of the best intelligence of the North could have subscribed to Motley's words, "My respect for the character of the President increases every day."(1) The impression he made on men of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him often in the streets of Washington: "None of the artists or pictures have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. One of the great portrait painters of two or three ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... that too is indispensable, which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist: she herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty which enables her to reproduce it. Something of the large tolerance which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the title of O Pioneers! breathes in all her work. Like him she has tasted the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of vast distances, the rapture of the green earth ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... American authors whose births made the year 1819 a notable one in our literary history,—Lowell, Whitman, and Melville,—it is interesting to observe that the two latter were both descended, on the fathers' and mothers' sides respectively, from have families of British New England and Dutch New York extraction. Whitman and Van Velsor, Melville and Gansevoort, were the several combinations ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Walt Whitman, the poet, has sketched in graphic language the scenes of that most eventful fourteenth of April. His account of the assassination has become ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... American Magazine, was reprinted in a volume called The Gold Brick, published in 1910. The quotation "chip at crusts like Hindus" is from Robert Browning's poem "Youth and Art." The reference to "Old Walt" at the end of the story is to Walt Whitman, one of the great poets ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... to the Highlands, and moulded the dramas of Byron, and the often vague imagery of Shelley; it appears in the style of Kingsley's Hereward, and directly or indirectly it is responsible for the pioneering efforts of Walt Whitman in prose poetry and for the rapid growth of poetic prose through De Quincey, Bulwer Lytton, and Ruskin. During last century it stirred Blake to misty prophecies, led writers of romance back into the less known periods ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... your youngsters wrote, but they were not so fortunate in their attempts. "Mignon" suggests the word "Heads," for the reason that the guessing has given employment to many heads. John F. Wyatt thinks that "Beautiful" is the word. Alfred Whitman, C.H. Payne, and Nellie Emerson, though writing from three places far apart, agree in giving the word "Reverie" as their notion of the right one. George A. Mitchell thinks it is "Study"; Arthur W. James guesses "Meditation"; and Hallie quietly hints "Calm." "P.," however, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... thinking to a tune. Nelson's "In honour I gained them, in honour I will die with them," has more rhythm than much that is called vers libres. Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" might be a great line in Walt Whitman. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare—a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more "progressive" than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought "progressive." He thought Valentin "progressive," thereby doing ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... be eloquent when the fancy takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest and plainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like an American, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not the exponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, excepting Walt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a great democracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, as he displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves are not reverend, and since its point of view is not one from which all things are visible ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of the great quadroon, with his short crisped locks, suggests a closer relationship to the race thus apostrophized by Walt Whitman— ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... them Lincoln's greatest single act—Emancipation—through the eyes of Garfield and Whittier. He should try to reach the children with the thrill of an adoring sorrow-maddened country at the bier of its great preserver; with such a passion of love and patriotism as vibrates in the lines of Whitman, Brownell and Bryant, of Stoddard, Procter, Howe, Holmes, Lowell, and in the throbbing periods of Henry Ward Beecher. His main object should be to make his pupils love Lincoln. He should appeal to their national pride with the foreign tributes to Lincoln's greatness; ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Mrs. Garrison introduced me to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by appointment I had an hour and a half's chat with him in the last year of his long life. He was the only survivor of a famous band of New England writers, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorn, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and Whitman were dead. His memory was failing, and he forgot some of his own characters; but Elsie Venner he remembered perfectly and he woke to full animation when I objected to the fatalism of heredity as being about as paralysing to effort as the ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... ago, the New York "Globe," on announcing a new book by Mr. Burroughs, said, "It has been the lot of few writers of this country or of any country to gain such good will and personal esteem as for many years have been freely given to John Burroughs." If we ask why this is so, we find it answered by Whitman, who, in conversation with a friend, said, "John is one of the true hearts—one of the true ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... and Intellectual Changes. Brook Farm and Other Reform Societies. The Transcendental Movement. Literary Characteristics of the Period. The Elder Poets. Longfellow. Whittier. Lowell. Holmes, Lanier. Whitman. The Greater Prose Writers. Emerson. Hawthorne. Some Minor Poets. Timrod, Hayne, Ryan, Stoddard and Bayard Taylor. Secondary Writers of Fiction. Mrs. Stowe, Dana, Herman Melville, Cooke, Eggleston and Winthrop. Juvenile Literature. Louisa M. Alcott. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... turn for an essay-writer to destroy Walt Whitman,—for he was discovered by the essayists, and but for them his notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. He is the mare's nest of "American Literature," and scarce a contributor to The Saturday Review ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... fact: Whitman merely wanted to live with animals—he did not desire to become one. He wasn't willing to forfeit knowledge; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has come from his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... moderate-sized county seat in Missouri not many years ago might have been seen a true patriarch. Tall, white-haired, stout in body and mind, he roamed among his neighbors, dispensing sympathy and a curiously genial human interest through the leisure of his day. One might have taken him to be Walt Whitman, of whom he was the living counterpart; or, in the clear eye, high forehead and thick, appealing white hair, have seen a marked similarity to Bryant as he appeared in his later years. Already at this time he had seen man's allotted ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... could do it after you had read Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... some of the National, and her pen has always been sharpened in ready defense of the cause and its leaders. A woman of rare good sense and large sympathies, she is always to be trusted in emergencies. Sarah Helen Whitman was the first literary woman of reputation who gave her name to the cause, and her interest has never lessened, though ill health has prevented any work. Alice Cary for years gave her heartiest sympathy ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... William Canton To the Cuckoo John Logan The Cuckoo Frederick Locker-Lampson To the Cuckoo William Wordsworth The Eagle Alfred Tennyson The Hawkbit Charles G. D. Roberts The Heron Edward Hovell-Thurlow The Jackdaw William Cowper The Green Linnet William Wordsworth To the Man-of-War-Bird Walt Whitman The Maryland Yellow-Throat Henry Van Dyke Lament of a Mocking-bird Frances Anne Kemble "O Nightingale! Thou Surely Art" William Wordsworth Philomel Richard Barnfield Philomela Matthew Arnold On a Nightingale ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... halcyon days of the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman says, they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet only the most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined principally to starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits indulge in ice, agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax of their luxury is a ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Tennyson (to take an example) was due to the fact that this fine poet regarded Life and all its phenomena from the standpoint of the English public school, that he ethically and artistically embodied the sentiments of our excellent middle-class education. His great American contemporary, Whitman, in some respects the most commanding spirit of this generation, gained only a few disciples, and was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary criticism. Another prosperous writer, to whom I have already alluded, George Eliot, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... must follow him to his home, and if you have pluck enough to brave the swamp and the almost impenetrable tangle of undergrowth where the water thrush chooses to nest, there "In the swamp in secluded recesses, a shy and hidden bird is warbling a song;" and this warbled song that Walt Whitman so adored gives you your first clue to the proper classification of the bird. It has nothing in common with the serene, hymn-like voices of the true thrushes; the bird has no flute-like notes, but an ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility let loose. Instead of such low language as "Go heel yourself—I mean to kill you on sight," the words, "Sir, we are incompossible," would ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... put himself instinctively in the way of receiving liberalizing influences. But it was, after all, an accident that he received those influences from France. He might conceivably have stayed at home and read Tolstoi or Walt Whitman! So indeed might the whole English literary revolt have taken its rise under different and perhaps happier influences. But it happened as it happened. And accidents are important. The accident of having to turn to France for moral support ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... if the flower of poetry lost? Surely not. The last half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have brought many beautiful flowers of poetry and hints of more perfect blossoms. Lanier has sung of the life of the south he loved; Whitman and Miller have stirred us with enthusiasm for the progress of the nation; Field and Riley have made us laugh and cry in sympathy; Aldrich, Sill, Van Dyke, Burroughs, and Thoreau have shared with us their hoard of beauty. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little library,—poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... be possible that this Captain Brown should have his Pinturicchio? Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis? Abigail also had Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was preaching the doctrine of brotherhood, democracy, resistance to ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... we met a cart coming toward Tautira, and one of the two natives in it attracted my interest. He was very tall and broad and proud of carriage, old, but still unbroken in form or feature, and with a look of unconformity that marked him for a rebel. Against what? I wondered. Walt Whitman had that look, and so had Lincoln; and Thomas Paine, who more than any Englishman aided the American Revolution. Mysticism was in this man's eyes, which did not gaze at the things about him, but were blinds to a ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... organs as if cells did not exist, or as if they existed only in complete subordination to its will, if I may so speak. The organization of the egg is carried forward to the adult as an unbroken physiological unity, or individuality, through all modifications and transformations." And Wilson, Whitman, Hertwig, and others urge "that the organism as a whole controls the formative processes going on in each part" of the embryo. And many years ago Huxley wrote, "They (the cells) are no more the producers of the vital phenomena than the shells scattered along the sea-beach ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... life a firm grasp of the obvious, there were windows in his soul which looked out onto vague and ethereal prospects which so far from being obvious were only dimly intelligible. In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythms of Walt Whitman, but their smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever to the productions of that barbaric bard, whose works were quite unknown in Riseholme. Already a couple of volumes of these prose-poems ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... invoke the strong spirit of Diogenes whose sturdy freedom of thought was like that of Walt Whitman, to cooperate in the review of modern life. Such men are greatly needed to review a corrupt civilization; and where is the civilization now, where was there ever a civilization that was not corrupt? The function of Diogenes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... blasphemy as an outburst of Anarchism all but broke up a meeting held last night in the Masonic Temple under the auspices of the Spencer-Whitman Center, at which the subject of "Crime in Chicago" was discussed by various speakers. The Rev. John Roach Straton, pastor of the Second Baptist Church, was in the midst of the discourse detailing his theories with reference to the subject in hand when a voice ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... striking and sometimes staggering utterances that do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching. Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intensely poetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them has a joy in life and living things like that of Shelley or Whitman, combined with a return to simplicity beyond that of Tolstoy or Thoreau. Indeed I rather wonder that those, whose merely historic or humanistic view of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity, have not made ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... this preliminary chapter, and the final survey and revision of my Whitman essay, I am making at a rustic house I have built at a wild place a mile or more from my home upon the river. I call this place Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet,—an amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... following another trail, and I went so far that I came clear up to the German barbed wire, where I left a card with my name. It was very thrilling work, "courting destruction with taunts, with invitations" as Whitman would say. I have never been in a sector like this, where patrols could be made in daylight. Here the deep forest permits it. It also greatly facilitates ambushes, for one must keep to the paths, owing to the underbrush. I and a few others are going to try to get permission to go out on 'patrouilles ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... supreme reason. There was no chain for him in cause and effect, no unthinking of the will of man. Rather by knowledge man would discover his own will and know that it was the universal will. So man must never be afraid of knowledge. "The eye is the window of the soul." Like Whitman he tells us always to look with the eye, and so to confound the wisdom of ages. There is in every man's vision the power of relating himself now and directly to reality by knowledge; and in knowing other things he knows himself. By knowledge man changes what seemed ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... land, and to free her from continual warlike alarms, Determined that he would popularize the conception (and a very good one too) of a Nation in Arms! Now this is the way he proceeded to fan the flame of patriot ardour— (This metre looks at first as easy to write as blank verse, or Walt Whitman, but is in reality considerably harder),— He assured his crowded audience that, while everyone must deprecate a horrid, militant, Jingoist attitude, Not to serve one's country—at least on Saturday afternoons—was the very blackest ingratitude: ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... speak, and not only declare that such-and-such a work reveals a rising genius, but give his reasons why he declares it, distinguishing the poetical elements in which the genius is shown. The critic should frankly analyse; but mostly he does not. He tells us, for instance, that Walt Whitman is the "Adam of a new poetical era," or else that he is "a dunce of inconceivable incoherence and incompetence"; but usually he does not show us the precise data upon which either conclusion is based. Cannot profundity of thought, ardour of emotion, power and charm of expression, be actually demonstrated ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Drydenic styles, i.e., pre-1660 and post-1660, was simply due to the change in ideas caused by the reaction against Puritanism." Agreeing with Hudson that there is much poetry which is prosaic and much prose which is poetical, he cites as examples: "Prose in Poetry: Pope, Dryden, Walt Whitman. Poetry in Prose: Carlyle, Macaulay, Goethe." He did not concur with Hudson's remark that the "full significance of poetry can be appreciated only when it addresses us through the ear," and that "the silent perusal of the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... have been poring over your last two or three letters, and they read like a set of briefs for a debate. Doubtless mine have the same forensic quality. Our letters have become rebuttals, pure and simple. This discovery gave my pen pause for a week. It occurred to me that Walt Whitman must have meant didactic letters too, when he said of the fretters of our little world, "They make me sick talking of their duty to God." Yet friend should speak to friend, should utter the word than which nothing is more sacred. "Let there be light, and there was light"—a ripple of light, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... lips in street and shop aver As common tidings, deeds to make his cheek Flush from the bronze, and his dead throat to speak? Surely some elder singer would arise, Whose harp hath leave to threaten and to mourn Above this people when they go astray. Is Whitman, the strong spirit, overworn? Has Whittier put his yearning wrath away? I will not and I dare not yet believe! Though furtively the sunlight seems to grieve, And the spring-laden breeze Out of the gladdening west is sinister With sounds of nameless battle overseas; Though ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... play Wagner for the first time sacrificed every precedent of musical construction and all thought of symmetrical form, in order to make the music tell the tale. "The Flying Dutchman" is to opera what Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is to poetry, or Millet's "Sower" is to painting. There is strength, heroic strength, in each of these masterpieces I have named, but the "Dutchman" needs a listener, "Leaves of Grass" requires a reader who has experienced, and the "Sower" demands one who has ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... simple, naked fashion the horrors of some undressed humans. His landscapes are primitive though suffused by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of general vitality. You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted trees were "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." They utter, if anything, raucous oaths, as seemingly do the self-portraits—exceedingly well modelled, however. Cezanne's still-life attracts by its whole-souled absorption; these fruits and vegetables really ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky, silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the beatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such rapture ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Mr. Whitman the addresses of the three places, which are known as "stockades." He also made suggestions as to how their operators might ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... when he read any particular book, or with any vividness recall the mood it evoked in him. When I close my eyes, and brood in memory over the books which most profoundly affected me, I find none excited my imagination more than Standish O'Grady's epical narrative of Cuculain. Whitman said of his Leaves of Grass, "Camerado, this is no book: who touches this touches a man" and O'Grady might have boasted of his Bardic History of Ireland, written with his whole being, that there was more than a man in it, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... and much else that is more regrettable than we are always able to realize. There is no general and ever-increasing evolution towards perfection. "Existence is realized in its perfection under whatever aspect it is manifested," says Jules de Gaultier. Or, as Whitman put it, "There will never be any more perfection than there is now." We cannot expect an increased power of growth and realization in existence, as a whole, leading to any general perfection; we can only expect to see the triumph of individuals, or of groups of individuals, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... out here where the sun goes down is an intensely interesting and beautiful country of our own that we overlook. You know I'd never before been even as far as Chicago. Now for the first time I can appreciate lots of those things in Whitman, that— ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... psychology of the situation. He asked, on another, if we had sold a copy of "Predestined" yet. A few days following he inquired, "How long does it take before a book gets started?" Dejected was his mien. It took "Predestined" some time. Then it went very well. We sold a joyous-looking Stephen French Whitman, an embodiment of gusto—there was a positive crackle to his fine black eyes—a pile of books concerning themselves with Europe, and did not see him again for some time. Then he flashed upon ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled 'The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas", whom he does not name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Greek, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Wash.: "From my rapid inspection I regard it as superior even to my anticipations. I trust that it will have an extensive sale and corresponding influence. It is the book needed just now. I hope to write ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... sends us a mass of stuff, which savours strongly of Walt Whitman, and which, probably for that reason, he calls poetry. We have room for but a single bit of description, which we print as an illustration of the depth of literary depravity which may be attained by a ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart - these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I have known one ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... circles' and nothing more. This man was practising Yoga unconsciously. You must be able to lose all consciousness of this relative personality, the sure victim of death and impermanence. You must give up the personal ego that in the words of Walt Whitman 'is contained within your hat and boots' and then alone will you realise an infinite individuality. Truly in losing himself man finds Himself. 'Ye must be born anew'. Herein, apart from its formative and moulding influence lies the greatest value of study. Study and direct aural influence ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... from Samoa, brought to Stevenson's friends, myself among the number, a precious, if pathetic, memorial of the master. It is in the form of "A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends," by his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and bears the motto from Walt Whitman, "I have been waiting for you these many years. Give me your hand and welcome." Mr Osbourne gives a full account of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... chattered all through that golden day on all subjects, in the heavens above, on the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth! With what fresh delight, in keeping with the scene, we compared our favorite authors and capped each other's quotations! Rare Walt Whitman told Mr. Conway that his forte was "loafing and writing poems." Well, we loafed too, and if we did not write poems, we startled the birds, the sheep, the cattle, and stray pedestrians, by reciting them. I returned home with that pleasant feeling of fatigue ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Whitman refers to "the slumbering and liquid trees." These Yosemite oaks recall his expression more surely than ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... note as characteristic of my brother, that, twelve years after his death, Walt Whitman, who always gravely spoke the exact truth, told me that there was one year of his life during which he had received no encouragement as a poet, and so much ridicule that he was in utter despondency. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of this, any more than Keats was; his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his conviction by the same reflection as that ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... their own land. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men are justly entitled to such characterization. They ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... gardener of S. Saba grows his pinks and freesias without a spade or hoe visible anywhere; the soil which seems to demand no plough; the farthest possible from the honest and stiff clay, demanding human work, of nature; the Roman soil, a compost, as Whitman would say, ready manured! The work of man in this earth (of which a pinch transported into church front or roof produces great tufts of fennel and wild mignonette), the work of man in it merely to ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... the soldier; Goldoni, the dramatist; Paolo Sarpi, the monkish diplomatist; Galileo Galilei, the astronomer and mathematician; the two Cabots, the explorers, and Marco Polo, their predecessor; Niccolo Tommaseo, the patriot and associate of Daniele Manin, looking very like a blend of Walt Whitman and Tennyson; Dante; a small selection of Doges, of whom the great Andrea Dandolo is the most striking; Tintoretto, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Paul Veronese; Tiepolo, a big-faced man in a wig whom the inscription ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... Sammy," said Ravenel, seriously (a tone that insured him to be speaking lightly), "ought to understand. Now, here is a magazine that once printed Poe and Lowell and Whitman and Bret Harte and Du Maurier and Lanier and—well, that gives you the idea. The current number has this literary feast to set before you: an article on the stokers and coal bunkers of battleships, an expose of the methods employed in making ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... condemnation of society, as it is and always had been, was equally radical and sweeping. Even humanists less violent in their protest, not so negative in their criticism, nor so positive in their offered substitutes, like Carlyle and Emerson, like Shelley and Whitman and Swinburne, like Henry George and Henry Demorest Lloyd, all aim to create in us the judgment that civilization, as it has been from the first, is no friend to the best in any man. No lover of humanity seems ever to have worshipped ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow. As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe." —WALT WHITMAN. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... theater, mounted a horse in waiting, and escaped to Virginia. There he was found hidden in a barn and shot. The body of the Martyr President was borne from Washington to Springfield, by the route he took when coming to his first inauguration in 1861. Read Walt Whitman's ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... public. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, were Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by The Angel in the House. Indeed, the poems of these two sold better than novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minor poets still wrote in the style of Pope, and the narrative shared honors with the moral platitude in popular regard. Tennyson, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872), Studies of the Greek Poets (1873 and 1876), Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (1884), and Lives of various poets, including Ben Jonson, Shelley, and Walt Whitman. He also made remarkable translations of the sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella, and wrote upon philosophical ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... large and general, and the emotions which it excites are co-extensive with the world. Therefore, Pantheistic mysticism, from the Bhagavadgita of the far East, through the Persian Soofis, down to the poets of our own century, Goethe, and Shelley, and Wordsworth, and Whitman, and many more whom it would be tedious to enumerate, has generated a whole tribe ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death), 'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets, their distress or disappearance, as ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... but with her growth had come a restlessness; she felt as though something were giving way beneath her feet like an iceberg melting in mild waters. There was one particular night that this restlessness had been strong. She had been to the Modern Language Club, and listened to a lecture on Walt Whitman, by Dr. Needler. She had never read any of Whitman's poetry before, she did not even like it. But there were phrases and sentences here and there, sometimes of Whitman's, sometimes of Dr. Needler's, that awakened a strange incoherent music in ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... by Tinker, Hall, Earle, Morris and Wyatt; metrical versions by Garnett, J.L. Hall, Lumsden, etc. The Exeter Book (a collection of Anglo-Saxon texts), edited and translated by Gollancz. The Christ of Cynewulf, prose translation by Whitman; the same poem, text and translation, by Gollancz; text by Cook. Caedmon's Paraphrase, text and translation, by Thorpe. Garnett's Elene, Judith, and other Anglo-Saxon Poems. Translations of Andreas and the Phoenix, in Gollancz's Exeter Book. Bede's History, in Temple ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... trees, instead of blustering dismissal, sounded to our ears like the fluttering of the blue-peter at the masthead of our voyage. Strange heart of man! A day back we were in tears at the thought of going. Now we are all smiles to think of it, all impatience to be gone. We quote Whitman a dozen times in the hour, and it is all "afoot and light-hearted" with us, and ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... creation and the embellishments of man. Under far more pleasant circumstances can it be traversed now than when the early pioneers first fought their way over the mountains. Lewis and Clarke, the Hudson's Bay Company men, and Marcus Whitman, supplemented their sturdy limbs and indomitable courage with the trusty saddle horse, the slow prairie schooner or the rude river raft. Today the palatial cars of four transcontinental lines make daily trips across the state; branch lines accommodate the territory ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... Your poet reminded me of something in Walt Whitman and I twisted it round and gave it to ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... were better off than He was? We are all tempted to think so when the conflict is pressing too hardly upon us. There seems to be less choice, and therefore less responsibility, among the beasts of the field; less play of right and wrong. 'I think,' said Walt Whitman— ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... social pleasure and do their best to respond to it, although at the same time they constantly minister to all the physical needs of an exigent family of little children. We often come to a realization of the truth of Walt Whitman's statement, that one of the surest sources of wisdom is the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... if all works dealing with national glory and victory, with national courage and patriotic songs could be used for bonfires. In their place we could have the poems of Shelley and Whitman, essays of Emerson or Thoreau, the Book of the Bees, by Maeterlink, the music of Wagner, Beethoven and Tschaikovsky, the wonderful ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... not propose to submit the English of this new literary effort of the House of Representatives at Washington to a critical examination, (though it strikingly reminds us of some of the poems of Mr. Whitman, and is a very fair piece of descriptive verse in the b'hoy-anergic style,) or to attempt any argument on the vexed question of Protection. But there is a section of the proposed act which has a direct interest not only for all scholars, but for that large and constantly increasing ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being erudite. The vast country has produced a few men of great and original genius, such as Emerson and Theodore Parker, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman; but the sum total is as yet too small to leaven the mighty mass which learns its rudiments at school and college and which finishes its education with the newspaper and the lecture. When Emerson died it was said that ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... era remains to be recorded, that in which the United States confirmed its hold upon the Pacific coast, and here again the story is that of the lives of three men—Marcus Whitman, John Augustus Sutter, and John Charles Fremont. It was Whitman who brought home to the Nation the value of Oregon by a spectacular ride from ocean to ocean; it was Sutter who led the way for an American invasion of California, and who gave impetus ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... publications with the name of the editor, N. P. Willis, appended, and was ascribed to him. When first published, it contained the following additional stanza which Poe subsequently, at the suggestion of Mrs. Whitman, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... reminding her that she had not written to him. At this time he was but six years old, yet we see his ability to write a letter. This peculiar letter is the earliest in a long correspondence between mother and son. Mrs. Wesley preserved these letters, just as the mother of Whitman treasured the letters of Walt with a solicitude that seems tinged with the romantic. Much of the correspondence between John Wesley and his mother has been published, and in it we see the intimate touch of absolute mental undress where heart speaks to heart in abandon and self-forgetfulness. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... in the comminution of materials, need not be held to strict account in the matter of neatness or accuracy of title. The closing article, headed "The Flight of the Eagle," is the most remarkable of the collection. Who would suspect, under such a heading, an elaborate eulogy of Walt Whitman? The writer is obviously more at home among the song-birds than among the Raptores, unless he be the discoverer of some new species of eagle characterized by traits very unlike those of other members of the genus. It were to be wished that he had left out the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... material for what it is worth: "The iceage drove the Cromagnon from the caves which prophesied Cnossus and Pithom and the Temple of Athena in the Acropolis. This grass, twentiethcentury ice, drives magnates from their twentyroom villas to their twentyroom duplexes. The loss was yesterday's. Walt Whitman. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... "Yes. I'll ask Whitman to find some. I'm sorry to take you away from your folks, but it's only fifteen minutes, ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full of poetry of his own. And this harping on life's dulness and man's meanness is a loud profession ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was not even faintly apprehended, and even after "Huckleberry Finn" he was still bracketed with such laborious farceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Walter Besant, an Englishman, who first ventured to put him on his right shelf, along with Swift, Cervantes and Moliere. As for Poe and Whitman, the native recognition of their genius was so greatly conditioned by a characteristic horror of their immorality that it would be absurd to say that their own country understood them. Both were better and more quickly apprehended ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... saw that the light was still burning by the davenport, and went in. Dick was asleep with a volume of Whitman open on his chest, and Bassett saw ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "Old Walt Whitman's my favorite poet," said Tom. "Isn't he the fellow that tells you to 'loaf and invite ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... delight for the jaded senses of the reader is this enchanted domain of wonder-pieces! What an atmosphere of beauty, music, color! What resources of imagination, construction, analysis and absolute art! One might almost sympathize with Sarah Helen Whitman, who, confessing to a half faith in the old superstition of the significance of anagrams, found, in the transposed letters of Edgar Poe's name, the words "a God-peer." His mind, she says, was indeed a "Haunted Palace," echoing to the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and flows through it from form to form, from generation to generation, augmenting in force as it advances. It is one with spirit, and is incessant creation; the whole organic world is filled, from bottom to top, with one tremendous effort. It was long ago felicitously stated by Whitman in his "Leaves of Grass," "Urge and urge, always the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... second is its most essentially national production. To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon would involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the author by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties of art. Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of something not so much realised as widely sought after among the late generations of their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the society that brought them forth, an author would ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indisputably English; and yet when I find it in Walt Whitman's heartfelt lament for Lincoln, 'O Captain, my Captain', I cannot but feel it ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... selections from Walt Whitman are published by permission of Mr. Whitman; and those from Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Bret Harte, through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., the publishers of ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... representatives. To this there was but one exception, my immediate successor, and that was a case in which no fault need be imputed to either side. That Bismarck's feeling toward Americans generally was good is abundantly proven, and especially by such witnesses as Abeken, Sidney Whitman, and Moritz Busch, the last of whom has shown that, while the chancellor was very bitter against sundry German princes who lingered about the army and lived in Versailles at the public expense, he seemed always to rejoice in the presence ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... He will discover that it emancipates him from all dogmas—sometimes from all morality— and at the same time that it is very superstitious. One expert tells him that it is simply "Catholic piety," another that Walt Whitman was a typical mystic; a third assures him that all mysticism comes from the East, and supports his statement by an appeal to the mango trick. At the end of a prolonged course of lectures, sermons, tea-parties, and talks with earnest persons, the inquirer is still heard saying—too often ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... country the present great state of Oregon, although here Polk receded from his position and accepted a compromise which confined Oregon below the forty-ninth parallel. But even this was something of a triumph. With that triumph, the name of Marcus Whitman is most closely associated, through a brilliant but rather useless feat of his, of which we shall speak later on. Polk seems to have been an able and conscientious man, without any pretensions to genius—just a good, ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... like this, and kindnesses like this, put James not alone among the democrats of this uncertain world, but among the poets also; among the poetic philosophers who, like Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Whitman, have a sense of the pace of things. Sunlight and storm-cloud, the subdued busyness of outdoors, the rumble of cities, the mud of life's beginning and the heaven of its hopes, stain his pages with the glad, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the occasional passages of real poetic power with which Walt Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First passed the legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... side appeared Kilburn Whitman, Esq. of Pembroke, as Counsel for the Overseers; Messrs. J.J. Fiske of Wrentham, and Elijah Swift of Falmouth, both of the Governor's Council; the Rev. Phineas Fish, the Marshpee missionary, sent by Harvard College; Judge Marston, Nathaniel Hinckley and Charles Marston, all of Barnstable; Gideon ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... Walt Whitman are inscribed on the arch beneath the group of the Nations of the West: "Facing west from California's shores, inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I a child, very old, over waves towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar: look off the shores of my western sea, ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... I met Carlyle in the company of Moncure Conway in London in November, 1871. I met Emerson three times—in 1863 at West Point; in 1871 in Baltimore and Washington, where I heard him lecture; and at the Holmes birthday breakfast in Boston in 1879. I knew Walt Whitman intimately from 1863 until his death in 1892. I have met Lowell and Whittier, but not Longfellow or Bryant; I have seen Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Early, Sumner, Garfield, Cleveland, and other notable men of those days. I heard ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... himself for some unknown and imaginary wrong he had done her. Peggy rushed immediately up to her room to write reassuring pages to Harry, and her old-maid aunt had the horse put in the runabout and was driven over to Whitman, where nobody knows her—at least the telegraph operator does not. Then I sent a telegram to Mr. Harry Goward to the effect that if he did not keep his promise with regard to writing F. L. to P. her A. would never ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... speak of a painting as being a great work of art, but the art is not in the painting, the art is the feeling of beauty which the painting awakes in the observer. When we listen to an orchestra the music is what we feel. Said Walt Whitman: "Music is what awakes within us when we are reminded ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... way of contemplating these undistinguished masses of humanity, this 'h'-dropping, garlic-eating, child-begetting bourgeois, is Shakespeare's, Dickens', Whitman's way—through the eye of a gentle sympathetic beholder—one who understands Nature's trick of hiding her most precious things beneath rough husks and in rank and bearded envelopes—and not through the ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the Times was not very great, but his interest in Henry Whitman's story was even less, and he frankly allowed his gaze to wander over the books that covered the walls of the room. They were one of the things that fascinated him in the house. They extended from the floor to the ceiling and encircled the entire room, yielding only to the wide, high ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... and that the great forms of the future must be in prose. That is the "exquisite reason" of those whom the gods have not made poetical. It is like saying that there will be no more music, or that love is out of date. Forms change, but not essence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry which shall take in ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... but light-weight California model; that is, with pommel and cantle on a Whitman tree. It is fitted with gun-carrying case of the same leather and saddle-bag on the skirt of each side, and has a leather roll at the back strapped on to carry an extra jacket and a slicker. (A rain-coat is most important. I use a small size ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that his English admirers began to discover ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "the Becker Case" were these: Herman Rosenthal, a gambler of notorious reputation, one day went to District Attorney Whitman with the story that he was being hounded by the police—at the command of a certain Police Lieutenant. Rosenthal asserted that he had a story to tell which would shake up the New York Police Department. ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... completer life and those who have summoned them to an austerer and purer life, free from taint of sin and regret. We shall then put in the first group such well-known seers and poets as Epicurus, Lucretius, Horace, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Walter Pater, Walt Whitman; we shall think of the Greek gods, of the Renaissance artists, the English cavaliers. We shall think of the motto, "Carpe diem," and "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"; and ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... authors I have named is more widely known to-day than Cooper. Matthew Arnold has said somewhere that an author's place in the future is to be determined by his contemporaneous ranking in foreign lands. If that is true the names of Mark Twain, Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Poe will rank high in the annals of posterity, for their European fame is said to be the most general of any of the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... In a military hospital at Washington, Walt Whitman was engaged as a volunteer nurse. In a letter to a friend, he depicted in a few sentences the tragedy of it all, and yet the triumph of the spirit over the body and over death itself. He wrote of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to my account of the phenomenon of isolement, I may add a curious passage in Walt Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect, which shows that the poet knew this form ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... it in me that makes me tremble so at voices! Whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her will I follow," says Walt Whitman. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard |
