Van Velsor ancestry may be found in the ancient, grim, and crowded cemeteries of the two families and their branches, running back for many generations. To any "Old Mortality"

these cemeteries-one at West Hills, the other about a mile from Cold Spring Harbor-would fully repay the trouble to visit. Looking on them as I did a couple of summers since, I thought them the most solemn, natural, impressive burial-places I had

ever seen.

There is no doubt that both Walt Whitman's personality and writings are to be credited very largely to their Holland origin through his mother's side. A faithful and subtle investigation (and a very curious one it would be) might trace far back many of the elements of Leaves of Grass,* long before their author was born. From his mother also he derived his extraordinary affective nature, spirituality and human sympathy. From his' father chiefly must have come his passion for freedom, and the firmness of character which has enabled him to persevere for a lifetime in what he has called "carrying out his own ideal." I have heard him say, more than once, that all the members of his father's family were noted for their resolution (which he called obstinacy), and that nothing ever could or did turn any of them

*Washington Irving taught the people of New York to laugh at their Dutch ancestors. John Lothrop Motley has made them proud of them as the connecting link between themselves and the heroic founders of the Dutch Republic. It is full time that the New Netherlands colonists should be rescued from the limbo of absurdity into which Irving's wit cast them. They deserve rehabilitation and a serious history. The merits of their descendants speak for them. The old Knickerbocker families are still-and have been ever since the day when stout old Sir Robert Holmes seized the New Netherlands for England-among the first and best people in New York. If all the truth were known, we should be as proud of the ship "Goot Vrow" and the landing at Communipaw, as New Englanders are of the "May Flower" and Plymouth Rock. In Motley's pages what a noble people lives again! No grander fight than theirs for freedom was ever fought. In the cases of Greece against Persia, Switzerland against Austria and Burgundy, the American Colonies against England, the first French Republic against Monarchial Europe, certain special advantages were on the weaker though winning sides, and brilliant victories in the field decided the struggle. But the poor and peaceable little Dutch Provinces in their stand against bitter religious persecution, plus intolerable tyranny, from the wealthiest and most warlike Kingdom in Europe, were beaten repeatedly; yet they fought on, and when at last, wearied with slaughter, Spain gave over, and let them go free, it was not because she was defeated or lacked either men or means to carry on the contest, but because she saw that complete conquest of the Netherlands would mean the last Hollander dead in the last ditch, and the country the Dutch had reclaimed from the ocean once more sunk beneath its waves. Who can read that history and not think of it with pride, if the blood of those heroic people flows in his veins?-New York Tribune.

from a course they had once positively decided upon. From father and mother alike, he derived his magnificent physique, and (until he lost it in 1873 through special causes to be spoken of later) his almost unexampled health and fulness of bodily life. Walt Whitman* could say with perhaps a better right than almost any man for such a boast, that he was

Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother.

The other main element which has to be taken into account in the formation of the character of the poet, is that he was brought up on Long Island, or as he often calls it, giving the old Indian name, Paumanok, a peculiar region, over a hundred miles long, "shaped like a fish, plenty of sea-shore, the horizon boundless, the air fresh and healthy, the numerous bays and creeks swarming with aquatic birds, the south-side meadows covered with salt hay, the soil generally tough, but affording numberless springs of the sweetest water in the world." In certain parts the scenery, especially about West Hills and Huntington, and along the north side, is very picturesque. Here and there inland or along the coast are magnificent views, among them a grand one from the summit of "Jayne's Hill," about a mile from the old Whitman farm. On the broad top of this eminence the boy Walt Whitman must have lingered many an hour looking far over the slopes, the crests covered with trees, and the valleys between dotted with farm-houses-to the south far off the just visible waters of the Atlantic, to the north glimpses of Long Island Sound. Perhaps, indeed, there are few regions on the face of the earth better fitted for the concrete background of such a book as Leaves of Grass. After seeing and exploring it, the mind appreciates what was said by William O'Connor, after spending some weeks on Long Island and its shores, "that no one can ever really get at Whitman's poems, and their finest lights and shades, until he has visited and familiarized himself with the freshness, scope, wildness and seabeauty of this rugged Island."

While Walt Whitman was still a child his parents moved to

*At home, through infancy and boyhood, he was called "Walt," to distinguish him from his father "Walter," and the short name has always been used for him by his relatives and friends.