he came to the portals of death; his thoughts were crowding upon him in haste to be put into writing. There was something within him that refused to remain unexpressed. He had so much to say that this urgency tortured him.

As soon as he had written the Montecristi manifesto and the letters to Federico Henríquez y Carvajal1 and to Manuel Mercado, which are like a testament to his country, to his friends, and to his nation, he felt free of baggage, as Antonio Machado said. The man appeared enveloped in divine grace, ready to hasten his appointment with death. There are those who say or think that his sacrifice was absurd because he might quite properly have avoided meeting his fellow revolutionaries on the field of battle in Cuba. He did not believe so. But some of those who loved Martí the most would have wished to keep in reserve his remarkable intelligence and his unbounded self-denial for use when Cuba began its independent life.

No, he had the most glorious death that a hero can desire. He died like one of the people. Abraham Lincoln and José Martí, who were so much alike, stand out in life and in death as symbols of American democratic thought. Martí, who called the Negro and the Indian brothers, fell as they fell in the wars for freedom and independence. At Dos Ríos the great man, the thinker and the poet of continental stature, the insurgent captain, became by his own wish an unknown soldier. He was not frustrated; his heroic destiny was fulfilled. Perhaps Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, his fellow poet, thought of him when he wrote his elegy for those who die young. Like Simón Bolívar, Antonio José de Sucre and Francisco Morazán, his colleagues in the epic of America, he did

'See page 272.

not reach the age of fifty. Their lives, full of hope and abounding in promise, are venerated by the people at altars where the lights never grow dim.

Bolívar, Sucre, and Morazán often saw the sunrise of victory and knew the acclamations of triumph after glorious feats of valor. Martí experienced the bitterness of poverty, of imprisonment, of iron shackles, of exile. Nothing could defeat or discourage him; when he received the fatal volley he entered immortality with the generous smile of one who has given all he had to give.

Marti's heroic figure is known throughout America. His devotion to his country is deeply moving, and his nation has never failed him. His name, his work, his real life, and the legend of his deeds are known to the learned and the illiterate, to the rich and the humble, to children and the aged, to white and black, to the man of action and the thinker.

When one hears the popular quatrains and ballads glorifying the hero and martyr in which the name of Martí passes from one Cuban to another, one is witnessing the expression of a filial affection that is true and deep. José Martí is never absent from the hearts of his people. If he could look down on his native land, he would find a reward for his toil and efforts when he saw his free country eager to advance; he would know that his sacrifice was not vain and that his teachings have borne good fruit. He would see that Cuba is a country full of democratic fervor, strongly American in feeling and, like himself, imbued with a spirit of universal sympathy. Martí's ideas are a perpetual stimulus to all Cubans. His battle for the dignity of man and for the independence of his country, his paternal feeling towards the humble and the forgotten, have been incarnated in the history of Cuba and are venerated by all America.

New York, April 19, 1887. TO THE EDITOR OF "EL PARTIDO LIBERAL":1 "He looked like a god last night, as he sat in his red velvet armchair, with his white hair, his flowing beard, his bushy eyebrows, and his hand resting on a staff." That is what one of today's papers says of Walt Whitman, the seventy-year-old2 sage to whom discerning critics, always in the minority, assign an extraordinary place in the literature of his country and of his time. Only the sacred books of ancient days offer philosophy that can be compared, for prophetic language and robust poetry, to that which issues, in magnificent oracular aphorisms like flashes of light, from this aged poet whose astounding book is banned...

a

He is a poet to be studied, because if he does not have the best taste, he is the most daring, catholic, and unrestrained of his time. In his small wooden house, all but povertystricken, there hangs in a window a blackdraped picture of Victor Hugo; Emerson the noble and lofty clasped his shoulders and called him friend; Tennyson, whose eye can see beneath the surface, sends from his oak chair in England affectionate messages to the "grand old man;" Robert Buchanan, that spirited Englishman, cries out to the United States: "What can you know of letters, if fail to crown, with the honors that are his

you

due, the declining years of your colossal Walt Whitman?"

He lives in the country, where untutored man and his patient horses till the open field under the burning sun; but he lives near the friendly and turbulent city, with its human noises, its kaleidoscope of toil, its manifold epic, its dusty streets, its smoking factories, with the sun looking down upon everything— "the of laborers seated at noon-time group with their open dinner-kettles," "the curtained litter, a sick man inside, borne to the hospital," "women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes."

Yesterday Whitman came in from the country to deliver, before an assembly of loyal friends, his oration upon that other son of nature, that other great and gentle soul, that "powerful western fallen star,” Abraham Lincoln. The cream of New York was there, listening in reverent silence to that brilliant address, which seemed at times, with its sudden flourishes, its vibrant tones, its solemn counterpoint, its Olympic familiarity, like the stars singing together.

Perhaps there is nothing finer in the poetry of our time than Whitman's mystical dirge on Lincoln. All Nature goes with the lamented bier as it journeys toward its grave. The stars have foretold it. The clouds had been darkening for a month. A gray-brown bird was singing its desolate song in the swamp. Between the thought of death and the knowledge of death the poet journeys across the troubled land as between two companions. With a musician's art he combines, mutes, and repeats these mournful elements in one complete harmony of twilight. When the poem ends it seems as though the

whole land were clothed in black, and the coffin covered it from one sea to the other. We see the clouds, the sagging moon which proclaims the catastrophe, the long wings of the gray-brown bird. It is much more beautiful, strange, and profound than Poe's Raven. The poet lays a sprig of lilac upon the bier....

Listen to what this people is saying in its toil and contentment; listen to Walt Whitman. Fulfillment of self will lift one up to the sublime, tolerance to justice, and order to happiness. He who lives within an autocratic creed is like an oyster in its shell, seeing only the prison that encloses it, and believing, in the darkness, that this is the world; freedom puts wings on the oyster. And that which sounded like terrible strife, when heard from within the shell, is discovered in the open air to be the natural pulsation of the vigorous life of the world. . .

Walt Whitman's style, wholly different from that of earlier poets, is suited in its individuality and force to his epochal poetry and to the new humanity, assembled on a continent breeding prodigies too great for lyrics or for neatly turned quatrains; here is no place for secret love-affairs, for ladies whose favors pass from knight to knight, or for the sterile plaints of those who have neither the power that can conquer life nor the discretion meet for cowards.

Here we have no dainty rhymes, no private griefs, but the birth of an era, the dawn of a definitive religion, and the spiritual renewal of mankind; here we have a faith to take the place of one that has died, a faith that rises radiant from the dynamic peace of ransomed man; here we have the sacred books of a people which is combining upon the ruins of the old world all the virgin forces of freedom with the fertility and richness of untamed Nature; here we have set to the music of words, the sounds of multitudes

finding their places, of cities in toil, of oceans mastered, and of rivers tamed and put to work. Is Walt Whitman to match consonants and frame couplets around these mountains of merchandise, these forests and thickets, these cities of ships, these struggles in which millions of men lay down their lives for the right; or around the sun which rules over all and sheds its white fire over the vastness of the landscape?

Oh no! Walt Whitman speaks in lines which have no obvious music, although after we have heard them we begin to perceive a sound like that which comes from the ground when barefoot armies march over it in triumph. There are times when Whitman's language is like a butcher shop hung with beeves; there are others when it is like a chorus of patriarchs, sitting together and singing with the gentle sadness that fills the world at the hour when smoke disappears among the clouds; sometimes it is like a rough kiss, like an assault, like the crackling of dried leather when it splits in the sun; but never does the phrase lose its rhythmic wavelike motion.

He says himself that he speaks "in prophetic alarms;" "I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future." That is what his poetry is, indicative; a feeling for the universal pervades the book and gives a magnificent symmetry to its superficial disorder; but his phrases, disjointed, snapping, incomplete, loose, are more like exclamations than like statements-"The white-topt mountains show in the distance-I fling out my fancies toward them;" "Earth! . . . Say, old Top-knot! what do you want?" "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." ...

... He sketches; but with fire, as it were. In five lines he ties into a bundle of freshly gnawed bones all the horrors of war. An adverb serves to expand or contract his phrase, an adjective to exalt it. His method

must be great since his effect is great, and yet he seems almost to proceed with no method at all; this is especially true in the use of words, which he mixes with a daring. never seen before, putting words which are lofty and almost sacred side by side with words regarded as hardly decent.

Some of his pictures he paints, not with the epithets he can make so lively and so profound, but with sounds, which he combines and removes with equal skill; and so by a change of approach he keeps up the interest which might be endangered by the monotony of a single manner. He induces melancholy by use of repetition, as do the savages. His caesura, unexpected and movable, changes constantly and conforms to no rule, although a cunning order can be felt.

in its evolution, pauses, and movements. He prefers to describe by heaping up; and his reasoning never takes the pedestrian forms of argument nor the grandiose tones of oratory rather the mysteriousness of insinuation, the fervor of certainty, and the fire of prophecy. At every turn we find in his book these words from our Spanish language: viva, camarada, libertad, americanos. But what is more characteristic than the French words he embeds in his verses with obvious delight and as if to emphasize their meaning? ami, exalté, accoucheur, nonchalant, ensemble; ensemble has a special fascination for him, because he sees the sky that covers the life of nations and of worlds. And from Italian he has taken the word bravura!

Montecristi, March 25, 1895

FRIEND AND BROTHER:

The responsibilities which fall to the lot of men who, not denying their slight effectiveness to the world, live to increase its measure of freedom and dignity, are such that language comes to seem vague infantile and one can hardly put into a meager phrase what could be said to a dear friend by an embrace. Thus it is with me now as, upon the threshold of a great duty, I answer your generous letter. It did me the utmost good, and gave me the only strength that great deeds require, which is to know that a sincere and honorable man is viewing them with ardent interest. Rare as mountain peaks are the men who can look on the world from above, feeling with the

Translated from Martí, Gonzalo de Quesada, Editor, Habana, 1909, Vol. 7, p. 308.

1 This letter was written less than two months before Marti met his death on the battlefield.

it wholly: I am writing, with deep emotion, in the silence of a home which for the good of my country is going to be abandoned, perhaps this very day. The least that I can do in gratitude for that sacrifice, since in this I shall be at one with my duty, is way to face death, if it awaits us on land or on sea, in the company of him2 who, because of the work of my hands, and respect for his own labors, and the passion of the soul common to our lands, goes forth from his loving and happy home with a handful of valiant

2 General Máximo Gómez, Dominican-born hero of Cuban independence. He was a leader in the insurrection of 1868, and generalissimo of the Cuban forces in 1895.

men, to set foot on the soil of a country overrun by enemies.

Aside from my conviction that my presence in Cuba now is at least as useful as it is outside, I was dying of shame to think that in such a great risk I might reach the point of convincing myself that it was my duty to let him go alone, and that a nation allows itself to be served, without scorn and aversion, by one who preached the necessity of dying and did not begin by risking his own life. Wherever my duty is greater, at home or abroad, there I shall be. Both may be possible

or necessary for me.

Perhaps I shall be able to contribute to the prime necessity of so organizing our renascent war that it will bear plainly, without useless minutiae, the germ of the principles indispensable to the credit of the revolution and to the security of the republic.

The difficulty with our wars of independence, and the reason for their slow and imperfect results, has been not so much the lack of mutual esteem among their leaders and the rivalry inherent in human nature as the lack of an organization which would include not only the spirit of redemption and integrity—which, with motives of lesser purity, foments and sustains the war-but also the practices and persons of the war.

After independence is won, there is another difficulty, for which our ruling and cultured classes have not yet found a solution. It is that of combining such forms of government as, without creating dissatisfaction among the intellectual aristocracy of the country, will embrace and allow the natural and increasing development ofthe more numerous and uneducated elements of the population, which an artificial government, even though fine and generous, would lead to anarchy or tyranny.

I called forth the war: and my responsibility begins with the war, instead of ending there. For me my country will never mean

triumph, but rather agony and duty.

Now

Already blood burns for battle. sacrifice must be endured with dignity, grace, and human meaning; the war must be waged and won; if it orders me, in accordance with my only wish, to remain, I shall remain with it; if, piercing my very soul, it orders me to go far away from those who are dying as I would die, I shall also have the courage for that. Whoever thinks of himself does not love his country; and the weakness of nations, however much it may be subtly hidden from them, lies in the obstructions or the hasty actions with which the self-interest of their representatives retards or accelerates the natural course of events. From me you may count on complete and continued selfrenunciation. I shall rouse the multitudes. But my only desire is to stay, to fight to the last ditch, to the last man; and to die in silence. For me, the time has come.

But still I can serve this single heart of our republics. The Antilles free will save the independence of our America, and the now dubious and battered honor of English America, and perhaps will hasten and stabilize the balance of the world. See what we are doing: you, with your premature gray hairs, and I, dragging along with my broken heart.

Why should I speak to you of Santo Domingo? Is that separate from Cuba? You are not a Cuban, yet is there anywhere a better one than you? And Gómez, is he not Cuban? And I, what am I, and who can place me in one land? Was not that soul mine, and I proud to own it, that soul which throbbed in your voice and carried me with it in that unforgettable evening of virile comradeship in the Sociedad de Amigos? I feel the same ardor; the two go together. And I bow to, and I may even say that I honor as a higher dispensation and as an American law, the happy necessity of setting forth with the aid of Santo Domingo for