grass and weeds, identified the place. Even the great old brook and spring seemed to have mostly dwindled away.

"In some particulars this whole scene, with what it aroused, memories of my young days there half a century ago, the vast old kitchen and ample fireplace and the sitting-room adjoining, the plain furniture, the meals, the house full of merry people, my grandmother Amy's sweet old face in its Quaker cap, my grandfather the Major,' jovial, red, stout, with sonorous voice and characteristic physiognomy, made perhaps the most pronounced half-day's experience of my whole jaunt.

Of the general region Whitman has said: "How well I remember the region- the flat plains with their prairie like vistas and grassy patches in every direction, and the kill-calf,' and herds of cattle and sheep. Then the South shores and the salt meadows and the sedgy smell, and numberless little bayous and hummock-islands in the waters, the habitat of every sort of fish and aquatic fowl of North America. And the bay mena strong, wild, peculiar race now extinct, or rather wholly changed. And the beach outside the sandy bars, with their old historic wrecks and storms -the weird white-gray beach- - not without its tales of pathos - tales too of grandest heroes and heroisms.'

In the midst of a sturdy agricultural community, and in association with farmers, pilots, and fishermen, Whitman spent thus much of his youth. He enjoyed the freedom of life in the open air. Neighbors remember him as a free-hearted and rollicking boy, broad-shouldered, nonchalant, a leader among his fellows. He dressed and looked like a "water dog." One sea-captain said of the young Whitman at Huntington, "I can smell salt water ten miles away on just seeing him." His boyhood memories were of swimming, boating, clam-digging, gathering sea-gulls' eggs, of light-house and pilot boat, of the farm life, and of the herdsmen and Indians of the interior.

With the associations of the homestead his poems are saturated. He acknowledges his origin in the poem beginning, "Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born. In There was a Child Went Forth the memories are all of his own boyhood, the associations either of Long Island or Brooklyn. As he was gifted with large receptivity, the capacity to affiliate with men and objects in multitudes, the extent of his absorption of his early environment can never be fully measured. His love of the sea, the salt and sedge of his works, and his sense of the mystic meaning of the

wave pushing upon the shore, moaning, and casting up driftwood, were gained at this time. The identification of himself with animals and all evolutionary growths was no doubt a lifelong experience. To the sun he said, "Always I have loved thee, even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by some wood edge, thy touching-distant beams enough, or man matured or young or old." Other details of early perception are revealed in

There was a Child Went Forth:

The early lilacs became part of this child,

The grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phobe-bird,

And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf,

And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him.

The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping, The strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in, The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud,

These became part of that child.

It was indeed on Long Island that much of his first work was written. He told a friend that he went down on Long Island on a cold, bleak promontory, where but one farmer resided, and lived there while Leaves of Grass was gestating. There he wrote

his first copy, and threw it into the sea.

VII

Two great races of Northern Europe, it will be seen, combined to produce a typical man: the Dutch contributed the more personal habits and traits, the English, sturdiness, force, and wilfulness. An inheritance of Quaker spirituality made complete the character on the religious and intuitive side. Heredity and training accrue thus far to democracy. Whitman was born of the people, of liberal and revolutionary stock. Political aristocracy had no part in his making. His ancestry and training are paralleled by that of

Lincoln and Grant, who sprang directly from the mass, and represent therefore the advance of humanity as a whole. If we were to prophesy from the beginning, it might be averred that Whitman, by birth and education, was singularly capacitated to become the poet of the Body and the Soul. His splendid health, life out of doors, power of sense absorption, would render him able to sing the "joys of mere living." Home ties, deep human sympathies, the democracy of the father, the intuition of the mother, the spirit of the simple Quaker homestead, the habit of communion with nature, would tend to make him the poet of the Soul.

VIII

A few early associations belong to Brooklyn. He attended the public schools of that city at intervals until he was about fourteen years of age, when he became apprenticed to the trade of printing in the office of The Brooklyn Star. One item of his childhood is

worth mentioning, since the incident links the poet with our national life. On the visit of Lafayette to this country in 1825 he assisted at the dedication of a public library in Brooklyn. On that occasion, while helping some children to a convenient place for witnessing the ceremony, Lafayette took up the child Walter, then about five years old, held him in his arms, and kissed him. As a boy, too, he spent much time at the river docks among the shipping and listening to the tales of the seamen. Such association formed no inconsiderable part of his education; for the seamen of that day, as John Swinton asserts, were men of tougher stock than those of the present, brainy, thoroughly American, literally children of the Revolution.

The New York period, from about 1840 to 1862, is most significant with regard to Whitman's real education. The years from 1840 to 1855 were the decisive ones in the formation of his character and in the preparation for the task of writing Leaves of Grass. These fifteen years of miscellaneous occupation constituted his apprenticeship to poetry. Altogether it was an education that exceeded in its results the conscious training of any other poet of the century. He spent his life on the Open Road, absorbing the outside shows, reading inarticulate objects as others read the pages of books. Many a day was spent on the ferries, or in sailing out to sea with the pilots, or in riding upon the omnibuses through the streets with their turbulent musical chorus." "I suppose the critics may laugh," Whitman once said, "but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drives, and declamations, and

escapades, undoubtedly entered into the gestation of Leaves of
Grass." It was his purpose to sound all the experiences of life.
He experimented in unwonted ways. He visited hospitals, alms-
houses, prisons, and the haunts of vice. He attended churches,
lectures, debates, political meetings, read at libraries, studied at
museums, spoke sometimes in debate, having trained himself as an
orator. He made himself familiar with all kinds of employments,
became intimate with laborers, business men, merchants, and men
of letters. He was a constant attender at the leading New York
theatres and opera houses, hearing every important actor and singer
of the time. He was especially affected by the elder Booth and
by Alboni.
His love of music, an elemental passion, was fully
gratified in New York. Proud Music of the Storm, written in
1871, shows a perfect intimacy with the method and content of
music:-

All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee, O soul,
But now it seems to me sound leads o'er all the rest.

"Give me,'

he exclaims, " to hold all sounds."

Fill me with all the voices of the universe,

Endow me with their throbbings, Nature's also,

The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,

Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!

In New York he witnessed all the national movements of the day. He saw or heard Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, Seward, Van Buren, Kossuth, Halleck, the Prince of Wales, Dickens, and other celebrities. One of his reminiscences refers to John Jacob Astor The year 1853 was signal as being the World's Fair year in New York, and the Exposition opened infinite opportunities to the eager Whitman. Through these years his curiosity was unbounded. His interests were absolutely universal, and his absorptive power was limited only by the things to be observed. Withal he accomplished, in an almost secret way, much careful reading and study. He collected immense scrap-books of articles on all manner of subjects, made abstracts of books and lectures, wrote out outlines of original lectures on history, philosophy, and politics. He was everywhere observant, absorbent, reflective, thoughtful. His enormous knowledge, universal sympathies, and serene wisdom were gained during this poetic apprenticeship. Out of the vision

which the soul saw of life in the mirror of the world Whitman's poems were composed. For an occupation he engaged in journalism, editing at different times The Brooklyn Eagle and The Freeman. At other times he took up house-building, abandoning this occupation after a few years, when it had become too exacting and remunerative. In 1849 he began his Wanderjahren, travelling through the Central West and the South. He remained

in New Orleans a year on the staff of the Crescent newspaper. In his journeys through the States he found "wonders, revelations, the real America. In travel he gathered materials with boundless curiosity. No one can know what multitudes went to the making of the composite Democratic Individual that uttered The Song of Myself.

While editor of The Freeman, he became one of the leading members of the group of New York Bohemians that met nightly at Pfaff's restaurant on Broadway to celebrate nationality in literature and art. For the decade preceding the war, The Saturday Press, assisted by the comic Vanity Fair under the editorship of Charles Farrar Browne, or "Artemus Ward," embodied the new literary movement of the city. With plenty of wit and cleverness, and some cynicism, the writers of these journals led the attack against literary shams. Among the Pfaffian group were Fitz-James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Aldrich, Stedman, William Winter, Ned Wilkins, George Arnold, Gardette, "Artemus Ward," Ada Clare, the Queen," and a score of others. The order had been established by Henry Clapp, who transplanted from Paris the moods and methods of Bohemia on the pattern of Henry Mürger's Vie de Bohème. Of this group Whitman was a recognized leader. Some of his stories were written at the hall of meeting. In one of his note-books is a rough sketch of a poem, beginning, "The vault at Pfaff's where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse, ," and closing: "You phantoms! oft I pause, yearn to arrest some one of you! Oft I doubt your reality, suspect all is but a pageant. In an interview published in The Brooklyn Eagle in 1886, Whitman gives an account of the meetings: "I used to go to Pfaff's nearly every night. It used to be a pleasant place to go in the evening after finishing the work of the day. When it began to grow dark, Pfaff would invite everybody who happened to be sitting in the cave he had under the sidewalk to some other part of the restaurant. There was a long table extending the length of the cave; and as the Bohemians put in an appearance Henry Clapp would take a seat at the head of the table. I think there