whole production, an essential spiritual kinship with Whitman expresses itself. The poem is not in any sense the work of an imitator. Such an one need not have troubled himself to translate Whitman into the terms of the schools. It is rather the utterance through a medium which has all the advantages of proved endurance, of the spirit which Whitman uttered. Mr. Lodge is not the sole voice of this spirit among his contemporaries. The spirit may have come to him and his fellows through channels with which Whitman has had little to do. Yet the resemblances are striking enough to fix a standing place of solid ground beneath those who believe that Whitman's "spiritual descendants" are many and widely distributed. To expect to find them all adopting Whitman's metrical methods would be like looking to-day for all the sympathy with the nineteenth-century revolt against Calvinism among those who wear the garb of the first insurgents.

But the writers who show the influence of Whitman must always, and happily, be outnumbered, a hundred to one, by the readers who feel it. What, after all, has he meant to them? Certainly he has not stocked their vocabularies with familiar phrases. This poet who confessed that he could not quote himself has done virtually nothing to enrich the currency of daily speech. Beyond the line, "I loafe and invite my soul," which, by the way, is pretty sure to be spoken with half a smile,—what phrase of Whitman has acquired anything like that place in the language which makes a dozen phrases of Longfellow and Emerson instantly recog nizable in any circle above the most il

literate? To make such phrases, the true Whitmanite will tell you, was not in Whitman's province; and he is right. It is not the letter, but the spirit of Whitman which gives him his power over those to whom he means either something or everything. He will mean nothing to those who have in their own souls nothing of the "born disciple." Even this elect reader may have to overcome obstacles. "One thing is certain," said Stevenson, "that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has grown accustomed to his faults." In this preliminary of acceptance may surely be included the discounting of all the unfortunate impressions which are likely to come from knowing too much of Whitman's personal history and characteristics. It is the triumph of Whitman that after all this clearing of the ground so much remains. For all who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear what Whitman has to bring, these things, in the end, seem to be his bountiful offerings: to open new vistas of thought and feeling, new appreciations of beauty; to set free our understandings and sympathies; to help us to realize ourselves as individuals and at the same time take our true places in a democratic world; to apprehend, as Americans, the bigness and significance of "these States," and, as human beings, the unity of mankind. All this is to place us in what is often a new and uplifting relation to the scheme of things. It matters not much by precisely what means it is accomplished. To accomplish it in any way is to work a spell beyond the power of all but a few of the greatest single forces that have influenced mankind.

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A CHILDISH CHAGRIN

THAT the sorrows of childhood, which are so droll to adults, are unspeakably keen to the child has often been remarked, and it is with amusement and a sigh that I recall a silly little experience which came somewhere about my seventh year. I had grown with such ill-judged rapidity as to injure my health, and was sent to recuperate at Cutler, a charming nook far down on the Maine coast, now not unknown to the summer visitor. There I was given over to the care of a kindly old lady, a patient of my father's. She offended my pride on my arrival by declaring in homely phrase that I had "grown up like a weed in the shadow of the pigsty;" but no one could have resisted the good-humor that radiated from her abundant person.

I had no playmates. If children of my tender age existed in Cutler I did not come in contact with them. I was so completely the victim of the kindness of my hostess, at least, that this obliterates all other memories. She was anxious that when my father returned to take me home he should find me greatly improved, and to this end she spared no pains. She gave me cream to drink, and of this I approved greatly; but alas! she had somewhere heard that raw eggs were excellent for delicate children, and from some association of eggs with milk warm from the cow, had added the refinement that the egg should be warm from the hen. This egg was the bane of my existence. I thought of it the first thing when I woke, and I had no appetite for breakfast because I could not help thinking of that ghastly potion, tepid and glutinous, which was sure to come in the middle of the forenoon. The hour varied a little according to the caprices of the hens, but sometime about ten was sure to arise the

shrill cackling which announced that my medicine was ready. One plump black bantam in particular had a cut-cut-kadark-cut which to my excited ears seemed fairly to split the welkin with its hateful din. She was especially approved by her mistress as the producer of big brown eggs, half as large again, it seemed to me, as any laid by the rest of the flock, and my wrath was proportionately furious against her. The air of conscious and officious superiority with which that fat black bantam strutted about after she had given to the world in general and to me in particular one of those famous brown eggs, the rasping discord of her raucous cackle, were enough to drive a nervous child to the verge of distraction.

The anguish I suffered over those doses is beyond telling, and as ludicrous now as it was grievous then. I used on the sly to throw stones at the hens, and especially at that obnoxious black pullet, in the vain hope that I might frighten them out of their infernal fertility, and escape for lack of eggs. I was aware at breakfast that not to eat was to render only doubly certain the coming of that stickily warm abomination, even then being carried about the farmyard by some officious fowl with eyes that shut up from the bottom. Morning after morning fairly choked in the attempt to eat so much breakfast that I might be spared the dose. I even on one unlucky day tried to conceal a square of corn-cake in my pocket, with the view of throwing it away afterward and cheating my solicitously kind landlady into the notion that I had eaten it. In my tremulous eagerness - I was absurdly nervous -I succeeded only in dropping it to the floor, and in being told, with a beaming smile on her part, that the floor was a poor place "for the Lord's good bread." I could not speak out, for the one or two attempts I made were over

whelmed by assurances that I did n't know what was good for me, and that at least I wished "to get chunked up" so that my father would be proud of me when he came to take me home.

When once the egg was safely transferred from the body of the hen to my own, Mrs. Stamen used to lead me to the outer door, put my cap firmly on my head, and say with a smile as beaming as that of Mrs. Fezziwig, "Now go and skip on the hills for an hour." This form of address I think I resented more than I did the raw egg. That was at worst a physical injury, and, however misjudged, it was well meant; but this direction to go and skip involved what appeared to my excited imagination a misconception of my dignity which was little less than a deliberate insult. I pondered much and darkly over the matter, and at last evolved the idea that the proper retort was: "I'm not a calf, Mrs. Stamen; and I don't skip." Day after day I tried to screw my courage up to utter this remarkable phrase; but day after day I went out for my solitary recreation with the brilliant repartee unsaid. I hugged myself in secret over the exquisite felicity of the retort, and whenever I saw a calf kick up his heels I chuckled to think how taken aback the old lady would be when I actually spoke. Morning after morning I considered the wit of what I was to say until at times I could almost forget the egg which was warming for me in the bosom of some frumpy fowl. Yet when I had strengthened my soul to produce my jewel of facetiousness, morning after morning I allowed myself to be led tamely to the door and dismissed with the customary instruction to go and skip, without finding courage to speak.

It was not until in the fullness of time father came to take me home that I got the words out. Holding his hand at the moment when we were saying good-by, I suddenly felt that now at last I dared say anything; and looking up boldly into the kindly, plump face above me, I declared firmly: "I am not a calf, Mrs. Stamen."

"What, deary?" she asked in perplexity.

My father looked down on me with quizzical eyes. It was evident that he appreciated the fact that something lay behind the irrelevant words, though he could not guess what. It came over me with a sickening sense of chagrin that neither of them knew in the least what I was talking about. Mrs. Stamen murmured that I was a queer, old-fashioned child; and I felt in a flash the impossibility of attempting anything in the way of explanation. I had shot my bolt, and it had failed of the mark. The exquisitely droll repartee over which I had secretly so rejoiced had fallen absolutely flat. My vanity, which had gloated over the certainty of seeing the quiet smile which could light my father's eyes and just touch the corners of his lips, was stabbed to the quick. I had expected to triumph, and I had simply seemed silly.

It is a trivial bit of the past to come floating up as it does now and again, and of course to-day one could not recall it without a smile; but when my fancy sees again the corpulent benevolence of Mrs. Stamen's figure, the gold beads floating like gilded driftwood on the billows of her neck, and the frail small boy before her flushed with mortification for his own failure, under the smile comes too the current of a sigh for the foolish and sorrowful chagrins of childhood.

MOUNT VERNON REVISITED

AMERICA is a country with many thousands of institutions and only one shrine; only one place in all this big country to which our smart, successful, self-complacent, self-indulgent folk resort from motives of piety purely; not even hoping, in this case, to get the burden of their own sins lightened thereby; abashed, even the most frivolous and vulgar of them, from the moment they enter the sacred precinct, by the commanding presence of a mighty shade: a great and grave Ideal.

I had not seen Mount Vernon for exactly twenty years, when, on the day before Easter, Holy Saturday, I went there with a sympathetic younger friend, much elbowed and put about, but never seriously offended, by a perfect mob of holiday "trippers" and school-children en

vacances.

We went down from Washington by the train, rather than by the Potomac boat, that we might the more conveniently stop off at shabby, sleepy old Alexandria. It was one of the first days of April, the first really mild and vernal morning of a cold, late spring. The river, under the long bridge, ran brown with Virginian soil; the attenuated sprays of the weeping willows along its banks, fledged lightly with their earliest foliage, waved in the soft, strong wind, like tresses of yellow hair.

The parishioners of St. John, having happily recovered — about a generation ago- some portion of the aesthetic senses which had been effectually scattered by our great war of independence, brought down from their dusty attic, and restored to its former position, all the beautiful old white woodwork of the church interior, the high panelled wainscotting, and the pulpit upborne upon its one tall column, like a lily on a slender stem. Young girls of the parish, on that sacred Saturday morning of suspended hope, were lovingly dusting pew and desk and wall-panel, and bringing in the first crocuses of the season, to trim the altar for the morrow's festa. What we saw was exactly what the Father of his Country used to see in his last years,

when he said his prayers weekly in the prim, high-backed pew, -only a little more spacious than its neighbors,standing up for the General Confession (we have it on the authority of his favorite Nelly Custis that he did not kneel), and getting counsel and comfort from somewhere, with courage to live on.

The tablet which records his passing, exactly at the close of the century that his name adorns, is in the centre of the white wall-space facing the Washington pew. It is an extremely modest memorial, without one word of pompous eulogy, and in the corresponding space upon the other side of the altar is inserted, with a curious effect of style and symmetry, another tablet, the only other one the church contains, to the memory of Robert Lee.

"Out of the same clay . . . one vessel to honour, and one" - not to dishonor surely, but to irremediable and most sorrowful defeat. Two brave sons of Virginia, baptized in the same faith, reared in the same tradition; "One port methought, alike they sought;" and it was easy, on that clear vigil of the Resurrection, to divine their union with full understanding there.

Some such simple morning-service as ours at Alexandria ought always, I think, to be first attended by the good American who proposes making his act of faith at Mount Vernon. It prepares the mind for what is to follow, and strikes the true chord of a dignified austerity. Let us faithfully keep the pitch of those two notes, the one just as essential as the other to a right perception of the genius loci: the silent admonition offered to a scampering, squandering generation by that beautiful old seat on the Potomac.

Beautiful for situation it certainly is. The eastern coast of the North American Continent can lay no great claim to distinction in scenery, as the glories of this world's landscape go. It is nowhere in the great style. But there are spots among its rugged hills, or along its

wooded river-banks and winding estuaries which have a very real and beguiling, if not overpowering, charm. Preeminent among these is that commanding slope upon the large bend of a noble stream, which was chosen with unerring if unconscious taste, by the man who built Mount Vernon: while the house he planned, both in its original form and as judiciously enlarged to meet the requirements of the retired generalissimo and chief magistrate, is worthy of the ground it stands on, and exactly adapted to it. Coming back after so long an absence, and after having seen quite a number of the more sumptuous habitations of men, I find Mount Vernon, more than ever, the ideal country home of the republican gentleman. It is exactly the sort of place which would have been dear to the heart of a Roman of the vieille roche, moved, by the reckless extravagances of a pair of comparatively new men like the Cicero brothers, to a certain fastidious disdain.

It has, indeed, now I come to think of it, not a little of the rustic nobility, the pure atmosphere of a homely religion, with which Pater, in his Marius, contrived to invest Whitenights, the ancestral home of his "naturally Christian" epicurean. How white the plenilunar nights must be, by the way, upon that spacious lawn at Mount Vernon, when surveyed from the long portico upon the river-front, the one rather stately architectural feature of the otherwise rigidly plain white mansion!

Here, where there is nothing for arrogant assumption or vain display, there is everything for personal refinement, an ordered leisure, the simple though ample entertainment of guests of any grade and in almost any number, the decent distinction of a manly retirement at the fitting hour into life's reserves, of one who has borne ungrudgingly the burden and heat of the day. "This modest estate is henceforth my throne. Bid kings come bow to it." And they

came.

One cannot help fancying upon the

I have always thought the groundplan of the Mount Vernon house very attractive, and I wonder that it has not been oftener copied. The carriagedrive and entrance at the back, between the old-fashioned garden with its prim box borders, and the kitchens and comfortable servants' quarters; the wide, airy hall running through the house to the door opening upon the great portico; the four moderate-sized living rooms, two on either side of the hall, - all with their graceful, ample fireplaces economically built across the inner angle; the slightly more elaborate but still simple "banqueting room," added in the final years, and balancing upon one side of the house the wing on the other with the spacious but severely plain library, a room with something about it of the solemnity of a chapel, made, if ever a room was made, for sober work, untroubled thought, and unspoken prayer,

all these go to make up an interior as unassuming as it is convenient.

The principal guest-rooms are on the first floor, in the main body of the house, while above the library is the quiet chamber, at whose door the most disreputable hat comes off, the shrillest accents are hushed in unaffected awe. For here, under the antique tester, the discharged warrior, the unwillingly released statesman, the happy farmer, lay down for the last time, after a hard day's ride over his beloved acres, through winter wind and sleet. "My lady". as certain folks of that day to whom their old-world habits clung were fond of calling her - would never allow this room to be occupied again. One seemed to see her a small and still erect, though rapidly aging figure, climbing o' winter nights, as we did on that April day, the narrow creak