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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way,
simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent
exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no
more colour or coherence than so many index-words out of a
dictionary? I do not know that we can say anything, but that
it is a prodigiously amusing exhibition for a line or so.
The worst of it is, that Whitman must have known better. The
man is a great critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good
one; and how much criticism does it require to know that
capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb
keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is
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