798 



WHITMAN, WALT. 



trade of carpenter in New York, removed from 

 West Hills to Brooklyn in 1823. There Whit- 

 man remained until about 1836. He studied in the 

 public schools until his twelfth year, when he 

 was employed as a boy in the office of a Brooklyn 

 lawyer, who instructed him in composition and 

 gave him tbe run of a circulating library. Two 

 years later he was apprenticed to a printer in the 

 same city, and thereafter until the civil war he 

 was chiefly occupied as printer, editor, and mis- 

 cellaneous writer. 

 He began very early 

 the practice of 

 spending as much 

 time as he could 

 spare on the Long 

 Island beaches, or 

 mingling with the 

 crowds at the 



ferries and in the 

 streets of Brooklyn 

 and New York, 

 thus gaining his 

 familiarity with 

 nature and men. 

 From eighteen to 

 twenty he taught 

 country schools in 



WALT WHITMAN. Western Long Is- 



land, and in 1839 



established and published for about a year his 

 first newspaper, the " Long Islander," at Hunting- 

 ton, his native town. Returning to Brooklyn and 

 New York, he was miscellaneously engaged as 

 printer and writer, with occasional activity as 

 a politician, until 1846, when he assumed the 

 editorship of the Brooklyn "Eagle." He was a 

 frequent attendant of the New York theaters 

 during this period, and some interesting reminis- 

 cences of the drama and opera of the time are 

 to be found among his prose writings. In 1848 

 he accepted a place on the " Crescent," at New 

 Orleans, La., and greatly enjoyed his first ex- 

 tended journey down the Ohio and Mississippi 

 Rivers. 



Returning after a year's residence in New Or- 

 leans, he established and edited for a short time 

 the Brooklyn " Freeman," but soon gave up this 

 and devoted himself to building and selling houses 

 in that city for two or three years. About 

 1853 he began to formulate his ideas for a new 

 kind of poetry, as developed in the first edition of 

 his "Leaves of Grass" (1855). As he himself 

 expressed it, he "had great trouble in leaving out 

 the stock ' poetical ' touches, but succeeded at 

 last." His contributions to literature, up to this 

 time, consisted chiefly of stories and poems of a 

 conventional character, and were printed in the 

 "Democratic Review "and other periodicals of 

 the day. With " Leaves of Grass" he adopted 

 a policy of individuality from which he never 

 afterward swerved. He assumed a workingman's 

 costume, but this should not be taken to mean 

 that he was negligent in dress, for his personal 

 neatness was marked to a degree, and became 

 "one of the roughs," associating more than ever 

 with the common people. From 1855 to the 

 breaking out of the civil war he was a pictu- 

 resque character on the streets of New York, and 

 made himself aggressively conspicuous. 



" Leaves of Grass " was received by the critical 



press with widely differing opinions. It may be 

 said, however, that the preponderance of these 

 was in Whitman's favor. The " North American 

 Re view, "an particular, gave the book a handsome 

 reception. In addition to this a warm letter 

 from Emerson, soon printed in the papers, at- 

 tracted much attention to the new poet. A sec- 

 ond edition of "Leaves of Grass " appeared in 

 1856, and it was to the use of his name in con- 

 nection with this edition that Emerson seriously 

 objected, for it contained additional poems on 

 sexual subjects which the Concord writer could 

 not approve of, although he had passed over 

 those in the first edition. Yet the friendship of 

 Emerson and Whitman was not broken by this 

 incident. Whitman visited Boston in 1860, to 

 superintend the publication of the third edition of 

 " Leaves of Grass " (1860-61), and then renewed 

 his friendly relations with the former. With the 

 appearance of the third edition, what has been 

 called the " Whitman cult " had its beginning in 

 a series of 'articles on the poet in the New York 

 "Saturday Press." From that time Whitman 

 never lacked for a defender, often from imagi- 

 nary attacks. The most notable episode of his life 

 undoubtedly was his three years' experience as a 

 volunteer nurse in the army hospitals of Wash- 

 ington. In December, 1862, hearing that his 

 brother, Col. George W. Whitman, was wounded 

 at the first Fredericksburg battle, Walt left for 

 the front. Thereafter he was a constant worker 

 in the hospitals until they closed, late in 1865. 

 He established himself in lodgings at Washing- 

 ton and, supporting himself by miscellaneous 

 work, raised funds among friends known and 

 unknown for the purpose of obtaining small lux- 

 uries for the wounded soldiers. These he dis- 

 tributed himself, writing letters for the soldiers, 

 attending to their wants, and making their stay 

 in the hospitals more endurable generally. The 

 amount of good he was able to do in this way was 

 very great, and many affecting stories are told of 

 the soldiers' gratitude for his devotion. 



He himself has preserved an interesting record 

 of this work in his " Memoranda during the 

 War" (1875), afterward incorporated in tho 

 volume of his prose works entitled "Specimen 

 Days and Collect." In the summer of 1864, after 

 a specially trying experience in nursing some 

 badly wounded soldiers, he became saturated 

 with the hospital malaria and was obliged to go 

 north for some months. He never thoroughly 

 recovered from the effects of this attack, which 

 is considered responsible for his final breakdown. 

 Returning to Washington in February, 1865, 

 he obtained a place in the Department of the 

 Interior, and gained more leisure for his hospital 

 work. From this he was dismissed by a new 

 secretary of the department, Hon. James Harlan, 

 in July of the same year. Mr. Harlan had 

 found a copy of " Leaves of Grass," arid was 

 unwilling that its author should remain on his 

 staff. For this outrage Mr. Harlan was soon 

 afterward roundly denounced in the now famous 

 pamphlet, "The Good Gray Poet: A Vindica- 

 tion, written by William Douglas O'Connor and 

 published early in 1866. Mr. O'Connor, as the 

 case seemed to demand, came forward on several 

 subsequent occasions in defense of his friend, but 

 never quite so effectively as in this brochure. 

 Shortly after his dismissal Whitman waG sent 



