Specimen Days in America. By Walt Whitman. (W. Scott.)— We
can praise Mr. Whitman when he writes prose ; and it is with prose that of late years he has chiefly occupied himself. Most of these specimens of his work have already appeared in America. They now appear revised by the author and with some small additions. The War of Secession is the subject of many of them, and it is by them that Mr. Whitman is probably best known to the majority of his English readers. He did good service in the hospitals of the North, and he records his experience,—very strange and startling experience, too. Of a brighter kind are Mr. Whitman's Natare-pictares :—
"• StninowN LIGIITS.—May gth, I p.m.—This is the hour for strange effects in light and shade—enough to make a colorist go delirious—long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest tenderest green), each leaf and branch of endless foliage a R- ap miracle, then ly Mg all proneon the youthful-ripe, interminable grass, and giving the blades not only aggregate but individual splendour, in ways unknown to any other hour. I have particular spots where I get these effects in their perfection. One broad splash lies on the water, with many a rippling twinkle, offset by the rapidly deepening black-green murky-transparent shadows behind, and at intervals all along the banks. These, with great shafts of horizontal fire thrown among the trees and along the grass as the sun lowers, give effects more and more peculiar, more and more superb, unearthly, rich and dazzling."
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