But my love soothes not me, not me.
Low hangs the moon, it rose late,

It is lagging-oh, I think it is heavy with love, with love.

Oh, madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love.

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?

What is that little black thing I see there in the white ?

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.

It stirs the boy's heart, and he feels that it is toward him and not really toward its mate that the bird sings, and a thousand echoes have started to life in his soul.

Oh, give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere),

Oh, if I am to have so much, let me have more!
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,

Whispered me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,

And again death, death, death, death, Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,

But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,

Death, death, death, death, death.

This is the only solution of the cries of unsatisfied love, and here lies the highest problem which awaits the poet always with its unconquerable, almost unassailable, mysteriousness. This word it is which he gives as the key to the thousand responsive songs awakened in him from that hour, the word which the sea whispered, "like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside."*"Whispers of Heavenly Death is the title of one section of these poems, and it is the Carol of Death which forms the centre of the second of the two poems to which attention has now been called. Splendidly imaginative is this "nocturne, with its three ever-recurring chords, "lilac, and star, and bird." more intricate construction than the other and less directly passionate, because expressive of a more reflecting sorrow, it is yet a composition which few can read or hear unmoved.

66

Of

As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,

As you dropped from the sky low down as if to

my side, while the other stars all look'd on, As we wander'd together the solemn night (for something, I know not what, kept me from sleep).

But he is drawn by the song of the bird, though for a moment he lingers, detained by the star, his departing comrade, and by the mastering odor of the lilac. Sea winds blown from east and west, from the Atlantic and from the Pacific, shall be the perfume for the grave of the man he loves. Pictures of growing spring" with floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous indolent sinking sun, of all the scenes of life in country or city of this varied and ample land, these shall adorn his burial house. But over all these falls the dark cloud,

And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

Then with the knowledge of death as walking

one side of me,

And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,

And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,

I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,

Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,

To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

The bird sang the "Carol of Death."

Prais'd be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,

And for love, sweet love-but praise! praise ! praise !

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding

death.

of all the slain soldiers of the war, and he sees that they were not as had been thought.

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not;

The living remained and suffer'd.

Passing from the visions and from the song, he unlooses the hold of his comrades' hands, and leaves the cedars and the lilac with heart-shaped leaves; yet each and all he keeps.

The song, the wondrous chant of the graybrown bird,

And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,

With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe,

With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,

Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep, for the dead I loved so

well,

The passage from this region of pure imagination and passion to the other works of the same writer compels us to deal with his religious and political philosophy. In religion, if he is to be labelled with a name, it must be perhaps

Pantheist," he is an exponent of "Cosmic Emotion.' "I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand not. God in the least. It is the contemplation of "the fathomless universe, and all its movements and rests, its organic and inorganic existences, which stirs the religious emotion in his soul. Men are inclined to cry, "What is this separate nature so unnatural ? What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth without a throb to answer ours, cold earth, the place of the function of the poet, to soothe graves)." To answer this question is sad incessant refrain, Wherefore, unsatisfied soul? and Whither, O mocking Life?" His answer is, Bathe in the Spirit of the Universe, intoxicate thyself with God.'

the

Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time, and Space,

and Death, like waters flowing,

Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite,

soul.

God, as he includes all, includes personality, and from God will come somehow a satisfaction of the longing of the What conclusions, if any, are to be drawn from the alteration in the new edition of the poem called "Gods," I leave it to the curious to consider; but in it clearly, as elsewhere, we find anticipation of the

Lover divine, and perfect comrade, Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain, of whom, whether he be ideal or real, we cannot pronounce.

About immortality he doubts, yet strongly believes. In moments of cool reflection he feels that the question of identity beyond the grave" is the great unsolved problem. Yet his poetical optimism continually leads him to assert immortality, and that not merely the merging of our life in the vital forces of the universe, though that is sometimes his meaning, but actual personal identity of the human soul after death. We have, on the one hand, among his first utterances

Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you.

God and the soul are not to be argued about ;

Logic and sermons never convince ;

The damp of the night strikes deeper into my soul.

But religion is the thing above all, and he rarely fails to point the way to spiritual meanings.

His morality is almost comprised in the one word "health," health of body and health of soul, the healthy and sane man to be the ultimate standard. These are Greek ethics, and the maxim on which they seem to be basedWhatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right

A

sane

is thoroughly Aristotelian. sensuality, as it is called by one of his friends, is a necessary part of the ideal man. The body is sacred as well as the soul, and to assert its sacredness is the purpose of his sometimes outrageous physiological details, which can hardly have the desired effect, but are clearly not meant, nor indeed adapted, to minister to vicious tastes; they may disgust, but they can hardly corrupt. There is indeed something in this tearing away of veils which, however justly it may offend true modesty, is to unhealthiness and pruriency as sunlight and the open air; they shrink from the exposure, and shiver at the healthy freshness; it is not an atmosphere in which they can long survive; mystery is the region in which they thrive, and

This man's nature is itself, as healthy as the sea, which endangers not us with all the fevers deposited in it.

His judgment of actions is rather æsthetic than strictly moral, and he admires the unconscious blossoming out of good and kindly deeds more than all the moral struggles which proceed from religious introspection. He envies the careless rectitude of the movements of

for we are betrayed,

Then indeed suspicion of death.

On the whole he seems to become more definite as he proceeds, in his anticipation of "identity after the grave." As for defined creeds, it is not they which give the life;

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him, it cannot fail.

And again of a future life

I have dreamed that we are not to be changed so much, nor the law of us changed; I have dreamed that heroes and good doers shall be under the present and past law, And that murderers, drunkards, and liars shall be under the present and past law, For I have dreamed that the law they are under now is enough.

But underlying all, so far as he himself is concerned, is a sympathy embracing all human beings, however vile, and all animals and plants, however irresponsive. It is this which leads him at times to emphasize his own sensuality, that he may make himself the equal of the most depraved, to draw them if it may be in the bonds of sympathy to himself. It is this which is the open secret of that magnetic influence which he is said to exercise over those whom he casually meets. It was this which led him to the hospitals rather than to the field of battle, and makes him recall in memory now the experiences of the Dresser," rather than the great battles and sieges at which he was present. No study of the poet would be complete which did not include the section of his work which deals with the war and after, which indeed contains some of the most magnificent and spirit-stirring trumpet-blasts, as well as some of the most deeply-moving aspects of suffering and death ever expressed by poet. Here was a great theme, and he treated it nobly; with all notes of patriotism and devotion to the flag is beautifully blended sympathy for the vanquished, and deep desire to relieve the sufferings of the wounded. On the whole no part of his work is more interesting than this; it is as if he were the born poet of emancipation, tender to all suffering persons, yet with nerve strong enough to endure without fainting or shrieking the stroke of necessary surgery. Magnificent is his war cry, as in the " Song of the Banner at Daybreak," and his note of triumph, "The war is completed, the

price is paid, the title settled beyond recall;" yet finer still is the "Vigil on the Field of Battle," the memories of the hospital tent with its long row of cots, the vision of the Mother of All gazing desperate on her dead, the reflection on those" Camps of Green "where friend and foe without hatred sleep, and need not any longer provide for outposts, nor word for the countersign, nor drummer to beat the morning drum. Other things, too, he gathered from the experiences of the war he gathered from them more than from all else the steadfastness of his belief in democracy, in the nobleness and courage of common men. But to speak of this would belong rather to a review of the "Democratic Vistas," which is not my task; the poetical aspects of the theme are enough. The poet then believes in the power of sympathy, but he believes also in individuality "underneath all-individuals. At least half his work is devoted to the assertion of this, and yet with this sympathy and " adhesiveness" is to go hand in hand, and he has as his watchword still the word of democracy, the word En-masse. The reconciliation is to be found in the prose more clearly than in the verse, but Whitman is not over-anxious for reconciliation; he is large, he contains multitudes, and has room for contradictions.

"

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

That being so, his optimism is the more comprehensible; and it is upon a basis of optimism after all that he builds his whole religion and philosophy. He has to firm a grasp of fact to ignore the existence of evil. If he exclaims at times, "There is no evil," he adds, or if there is, it is just as important to you as anything else." "I am not the poet of goodness only; I am just as much the poet of evil." But he believes that evil is transient, and relative; he holds that the drift of things is toward good; that all is, not at once, but finally for the best. This he says, in plain prose, is the growing conviction of his life, and in verse, of the souls of men and women | going forward long the roads of the universe,

They go, they go, I know that they go, but I know not where they go,

When liberty goes out of a place, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go, It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last. When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,

And when all lite and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth,

Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty,

be discharged from that part of the earth, And the infidel come into full possession.

Too much, perhaps, has been said of the religion and morality of the poet, and too little of the literary aspect of his works. But this it is difficult to illustrate sufficiently by quotation, and impossible to set forth without illustration. It seemed to me that suggestions of the

drift of the whole were more likely to be useful than attention to particular points. Every one will remark first the too frequent infelicity of sentiment and phrase, and then the striking directness of utterance, and the stumbling, as if by accident, on the absolutely best words in the absolutely best order, which characterizes his finest work. Whether these be truly poems, or fine imaginings only, we need not be much concerned to in

quire. His own claim to be the poet of America is based on other than purely literary grounds.

Give me the pay I have served for,

Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest.

I have loved the earth, sun, animals; I have despised riches;

I have given alms to every one that asked.. I have dismissed whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body,

Claimed nothing to myself which I have not carefully claimed for others on the same terms,

Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every state, (Upon this breast has many a dying soldier leaned to breathe his last).

*

*

*

been faithful?

*

Say, O mother, have I not to your thought
Have I not through life kept you and yours
before me?
The Nineteenth Century.

ENSILAGE is the packing of green forage in air and water-tight structures. The packing should be performed as rapidly as possible, and the forage spread evenly as it is stored, so as to fill the space, especially at the sides. When the silo, that is, the pit, is full, a temporary structure may be built round its sides, and a further supply heaped on top. It is then covered with planks sawn so as to nearly fit the length of the pit, and the whole heavily weighted. By these means the forage is pressed into a close mass, fermentation is early arrested, and the forage is kept sound and serviceable for an indefinite period. Some fermentation does take place, but it is said that in a well-constructed silo this fermentation is useful, if not necessary. Agricultural chemists allege that

the fermentation is that which naturally takes place in the first stomach of ruminant animals, and that therefore the processes of digestion and assimilation are aided by ensilage. The term ensilage is used to denote the process of storing and the product when stored.

The practice of ensilage is very ancient. It is plain that it was known five centuries before our era. The origin of the custom was probable insecurity. Husbandmen dug water-tight cavities under their houses and barns in order to store their produce and keep it from marauders, heaping earth or stones over the store, and so excluding the air. In course of time, they found that these hoards of grain were preserved in a sound state for a very long period. Corn, we are told, was laid up in ear, and kept for