New Orleans). He liked to go to the great French market for an early morning walk, for the sake of the peculiar stir and shows of the place-often took his breakfast at a coffee-stand there kept by a large, handsome mulatto woman. All who have lived in the Southern States, and love them (and who that has ever lived there can think of them without affection and longing?) will feel in a hundred places, in reading Leaves of Grass, that Walt Whitman has caught and transferred to his pages the true atmosphere of that delicious and sunny region.

After staying about a year in New Orleans, he visited various other parts of the South, and then turned North again. Ascending the Mississippi to St. Louis, he stayed there for a time, then journeyed to Chicago, to Milwaukee, and so up to the Straits of Mackinaw. From there, turning east and south, after lingering awhile at Detroit, he slowly descended the great lakes to Niagara, and, with many lags and stoppages, crossed New York State and returned to Brooklyn.

In 1851 and '52 he published and edited a newspaper of his own, the "Freeman," in Brooklyn. He afterward built and sold moderate-sized houses. At this last business he made money, and if he had continued would probably have become rich. (He seems to have thought there was danger of this, and that was one reason, no doubt, why he gave it up.) Early in the fifties Leaves of Grass began to take a sort of unconscious shape in his mind. In 1854 he commenced definitely writing out the poems that were printed in the first edition. Though most of this period was occupied with the house-building speculations, he made frequent excursions down Long Island, and at times would remain away in some solitary place, by the sea-shore or in the woods, for weeks at a time. The twelve poems which make up the original 1855 edition finished, they were printed at the establishment of Andrew and James Rome, corner of Fulton and Cranberry Streets, Brooklyn, the poet himself assisting to set the type.

I insert here a short account furnished me (in Brooklyn in July, 1881) by a person who knew Walt Whitman soon after

E

1849-that is, subsequent to his 30th year. I give it in the narrator's own words as I jotted them down at the time:

Walt Whitman had a small printing office and book store on Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, where after his return from the South he started the "Freeman" newspaper, first as weekly, then as daily, and continued it a year or so. The superficial opinion about him was that he was somewhat of an idler, "a loafer," but not in a bad sense. He always earned his own living. I thought him a very natural person. He wore plain, cheap clothes, which were always particularly clean. Everybody knew him, everyone almost liked him. We all of us (referring to the other members of his family, brothers, sisters, father and mother), long before he published Leaves of Grass, looked upon him as a man who was to make a mark in the world. He was always a good listener, the best I ever knew-of late years, I think, he talks somewhat more-in those early years (1849-'54) he talked very little indeed. When he did talk his conversation was remarkably pointed, attractive, and clear. When Leaves of Grass first appeared I thought it a great work, but that the man was greater than the book. His singular coolness was an especial feature. I have never seen him excited in the least degree: never heard him swear but once. He was quite gray at thirty. He had a look of age in his youth, as he has now a look of youth in his age.

The great International Exhibition or World's Fair of 1853 in New York, in that vast structure (Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street) of glass and iron, never excelled for architectural sentiment and beauty, with its rare and ample picture collection from Europe, its statues, specimens of the fabrics of all nations, silver and gold plate, machinery, ores, woods of different countries, with its immense streams of visitors day and night, had for him a powerful attraction, kept up for nearly a year. Among his favorite haunts through the building were the area containing Thorwaldsen's colossal group of Christ and the twelve apostles, the department of woods and timber, the thousand works in the long picture gallery-a collection never surpassed in any landand then occasionally to stand a long while under the lofty heavy glass dome.

Early in 1855 he was writing Leaves of Grass from time to time, getting it in shape. Wrote at the opera, in the street, on the ferry-boat, at the sea-side, in the fields, sometimes stopped work to write. Certainly no book was ever more directly written from living impulses and impromptu sights, and less in the

abstract. Quit house-building in the spring of 1855 to print and publish the first edition. Then, "when the book aroused such a tempest of anger and condemnation everywhere," to give his own words as he has since told me, "I went off to the "east end of Long Island, and spent the late summer and all the "fall-the happiest of my life-around Shelter Island and Peco"nic Bay. Then came back to New York with the confirmed "resolution, from which I never afterwards wavered, to go on "with my poetic enterprise in my own way, and finish it as well "as I could.”

Early in July this year had occurred the death of his father, after a suffering of many years, from serious illness and prostration.

The memoranda which follow were written for this volume in 1881 by a lady-Miss Helen E. Price, of Woodside, Long Island-whose acquaintance with Walt Whitman, and his frequent temporary residence in her parents' family, make her peculiarly competent to present a picture of the man in those periods of middle life:

My acquaintance with Walt Whitman began in 1856, or about a year after he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. I was at that time living with my parents in Brooklyn, and although hardly more than a child in years, the impression made upon my girlish imagination by his large, grand presence, his loose, free dress, and his musical voice will never be effaced. From that date until the death of his mother, in 1873, he was often a visitor at our house, as I at his, his mother being only less dear to me than my own.

So many remembrances of him in those by gone years come crowding to my mind that to choose what will be most characteristic, and most likely to interest those who know him only from his books, is a task to which I fear I shall prove unequal. On the other hand, anything I might write of him, his conversation especially, when deprived of the magnetism of his presence and voice, and of the circumstances and occasions which called forth the words, will, I am painfully aware, seem poor and tame.

I must preface my first anecdote of him with some description of a gentleman with whom many of my early recollections of his conversations are connected. At that time Mr. A. was living with his daughter's family, who occupied with us the same house. A. was a man of wide knowledge and the most analytical mind of any one I ever knew. He was a Swedenborgian, not formally belonging to the church of that name, but accepting in the