The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
This is realism, but a truly classic realism; it is earth, but the “poetry of earth.”
Probably Whitman has here and there approached as nearly as any English writer to this pure realism, and, when he has not allowed his delight in words to outrun his inward conception, he has given us pictures possessing much of the vivid objectivity of the Greek realists. Compare with the above passage from Theocritus the Farm Picture drawn by Whitman in these two lines:
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding.