Page images
PDF
EPUB

man, very kind to children and animals, good-natured, a good citizen, neighbor, and parent. His carpentry was solid and conscientious. His religious affinities were with the Quakers. The strong points of his character were resolution, love of freedom and independence.

The Van Velsors, the mother's family, were farmers and sailors of Holland-Dutch descent, having a homestead on Long Island at Cold Spring Harbor, some three miles distant from West Hills. The Van Velsors were generally warm-hearted, sympathetic, spiritual people. Major Cornelius was a jovial, freehearted Americanized Netherlander, with his family passion for fine horses. The maternal grandmother was a woman of exceptional spiritual character. She was a member of the Society of Friends, and was deeply intuitive and of a kindly charitable disposition. Whitman draws her portrait in his poem on Faces:

Behold a woman!

She looks out from her quaker cap, her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky.

She sits in an armchair under the shaded porch of the farmhouse, The sun just shines on her old white head.

Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen,

Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters spun it with the distaff and the wheel.

The melodious character of the earth,

The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go,

The justified mother of men.

Her name, Naomi Williams, suggests a Welsh or Celtic ancestry. The poet's mother, Louise, daughter of Cornelius Van Velsor, exhibits the best traits of the Holland woman, whose sign is a noble and perfect maternity. She was distinguished by sweetness of temper, sympathy, a genial optimism, and genuine spirituality of character. She was a hard worker, enjoyed splendid health, living to the age of eighty. Between her and Walt existed a strong and exceptional attachment. The poet always spoke of "dear, dear mother "; and of her and his sister Martha he said at the time of their death, in 1873, "They were the two best and sweetest women I have ever seen or known, or ever expect to see. It was undoubtedly from the mother that Whitman derived his essential nature. His due to her is acknowledged in his poem, As at thy Portals also Death: :

her as

[ocr errors]

As at thy portals also death,

Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,

To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
(I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,
I sit by the form in the coffin,

I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin;)

To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best,

I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
And set a tombstone here.

"As to loving and disinterested parents," Whitman has said, “no boy or man ever had more cause to bless and thank them than I." Of this inheritance of blood the Dutch ancestry is the most noticeable in Whitman's composition. He represents the DutchAmerican type. He had the splendid health of the Netherlanders, their blond face, tinged with rose, gentle eyes, and flaxen hair, which turned to white at thirty. As evidences of Dutch origin, William Sloane Kennedy points to Whitman's endurance, practicality, sanity, thrift, excessive neatness and purity of person, and the preponderance of the simple and serious over the humorous and refined in his phrenology. The forms of his art are Dutch,— its realism, its glorification of the commonplace, its transcendentalism and mysticism. His independence is Dutch. In the vistas of his democratic ideas is discernible the struggle of the Netherlands for liberty, free thought, and free institutions. There is evidence of the mingling somewhere of French Protestant blood with the Dutch stock,- a common occurrence in early New York. The French terms in his writings appear to be home words rather than learned from books.

[ocr errors]

The Quaker traditions were strongly imposed upon his character. He had Quaker habits, such as wearing the hat and dressing in plain gray clothes. He had a dislike of ostentation or sensationalism. He wrote to Osgood, his publisher, to make his book "plain and simple even to Quakerism no sensationalism about it—no luxury a book for honest wear and Quaker traits appear in his silence, plainness, placidity, sincerity, self-respect, dislike of debate, strife, and war. They are evidenced in his friendliness, benevolence, his deep religiousness, and in his trust in the "Inner Light." The spirit both of the grand

use.'

mother and mother descended upon him, directing his mind from childhood into spiritual channels. In the family and in the Long Island neighborhood the influence of Elias Hicks was strong and pervasive. The biography of Hicks that Whitman wrote in later life-loving and reverencing the great Quaker-is, as to spiritual matters, a transcript of the poet's own experiences. No one ever

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

put greater trust in the authority of his own soul and interior revelation than he who defined the doctrine of the Quakers in these terms: "The great matter is to reveal and outpour the Godlike suggestions pressing for birth in the soul." In the least thing or in the greatest Whitman waited for the promptings of the spirit, what he termed his "calls" or summons. As a Quaker, he could not take part in internecine strife; but he felt "called" to go to the field to do what he could for the suffering sick and wounded of whatever army. To his friends assembled in 1889 to do him honor he said: "Following the impulse of the spirit (for I am at least half of Quaker stock) I have obeyed the command to come and look at you for a minute and show myself face to face; which is probably the best I can do. But I have felt no command to make a speech; and shall not therefore attempt any."

VI

Up to the age of twenty Whitman's environment was largely constituted by Long Island. Though his parents resided during most of this period at Brooklyn, yet the boy paid frequent visits to his relations at West Hills, taught school at sixteen in different parts of the island, boarding round," and for a year or two edited at Huntington a newspaper, whose copies he distributed himself, walking or riding over the island.

Long Island was settled chiefly by the Dutch and English early in the seventeenth century. Their descendants, with some native Indians and a few negro slaves, constituted the population in Whitman's boyhood. Farming, ship-building, and fishing were the leading occupations. The island is about 120 miles long and 12 to 20 miles wide, in shape like a fish. Through the centre runs an irregular range of low hills, affording every variety of scenery. The coast line is indented with harbors. These and the salt marshes at the upper reaches of the inlets give characteristic touches to an island home. The hills are fully wooded with trees of oak, hickory, pine, chestnut, and locust. The farm-houses are generally low frame structures, covered roof and sides with

shingles that have weathered to a soft gray. About the hamlets are abundant orchards. Lilacs grow in every dooryard. The island is noted for its streams, its diminutive lakes, and its springs of cold water. The hermit-thrush is vocal in its woods. The general features of the landscape are irregularity, undulation, vista. These appear to be the very forms in which Whitman's thought is

cast.

At West Hills he had as concrete background the gently rolling country-side and views of the sea. The homestead was so named because of its situation in the midst of the group of hills which form the western portion of the island. Near the home rose Jaynes Hill, the highest point of land in Long Island, in height some 350 feet, from the summit of which is an extensive and picturesque prospect of the undulating hills and plains, the gleaming sound, and the white breakers of the sea. At the foot of the hill the

Whitman homestead was situated. A view of the original home and the domestic interior is furnished by John Burroughs in one of his early notes: "The Whitmans lived in a long story-and-a-half farmhouse, hugely timbered. A great smoke-canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and chimney, formed one end of the house. The existence of slavery in New York at that time, and the possession by the family of some twelve or fifteen slaves, house and field servants, gave things quite a patriarchal look. The very young darkies could be seen, a swarm of them, toward sundown, in the kitchen, squatted in a circle on the floor, eating their supper of Indian pudding and milk. In the house, and in food and furniture, all was rude, but substantial. No carpets nor stoves were known, and no coffee, and tea and sugar only for the women. Rousing wood fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights. Pork, poultry, beef, and all the ordinary vegetables and grains were plentiful. Cider was the men's common drink, and used at meals. The clothes were mainly homespun. Journeys were made by both men and women on horseback. Books were scarce. The annual copy of the Almanac was a treat, and was pored over through the long winter evenings.' Parts of this primitive cabin are still standing. Near by is a large oak-tree and a grove of black walnuts. Beyond the house a stream flows down from the hills eastward across the plains. About a mile to the east Whitman's parents resided. Of this scene at West Hills, Daniel G. Brinton has recorded his impression: "Here on this spot, I believe I caught what I had hoped I might the inspiration of the scene, which, unconsciously to himself, had moulded Walt's mind. I

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

say unconsciously, for once I asked him whether the landscapes of his boyhood still haunted his dreams and formed the settings and frames of his nightly visions, as mine do with me; but he returned one of those steady glances and vague replies with which he was wont to turn aside the curious, leaving me in doubt whether such was not the case, or whether I had approached with shodden feet some holy ground in the fane of his mind. Whatever the answer might have been, now I know that the peasant sturdiness of that landscape, its downright lines, its large sweeps, its lack of set forms, created the mould into which his later thought was cast. Neither years of wider life nor witnessing grander beauties altered him from what the West Hills had made him."

Cold Spring village, the home of the Van Velsors, is wilder and more romantic in its view of sea and shore. It is noted for its shipping and its sailors. This locality and the maternal homestead may be described in Whitman's own words, written while on a visit to the scene of his youth: —

"I write this paragraph on the burial hill of the Van Velsors near Cold Spring, the most significant depository of the dead that could be imagined, without the slightest help from art, soil sterile, a mostly bare plateau-flat of an acre, the top of a hill, brush and well-grown trees and dense woods bordering all around, very primitive, secluded, no visitors, no road (you cannot drive here, you have to bring the dead on foot, and follow on foot). Two or three-score graves quite plain; as many more almost rubbed out. My grandfather Cornelius and my grandmother Amy (Naomi) and numerous relatives nearer or remoter, on my mother's side, lie buried here. The scene as I stood or sat, the delicate and wild odor of the woods, a slightly drizzling rain, the emotional atmosphere of the place, and the inferred reminiscences, were such as I never realized before.

me as

"I went down from this ancient grave-place eighty or ninety rods to the site of the Van Velsor homestead, where my mother was born (1795), and where every spot had been familiar to a child and youth (1825-40). Then stood there a long rambling dark-gray, shingle-sided house, with sheds, pens, a great barn and much open road-space. Now of all these not a vestige left; all had been pulled down, erased, and the plough and harrow passed over foundations, road-spaces and everything for many summers; fenced in at present, and grain and clover growing like any other fine fields. Only a big hole from an ancient cellar, with some little heaps of broken stone, green with

« PreviousContinue »