Jackson, Webster, Clay, Lafayette, Kossuth, Fanny Kemble, Halleck, Cooper, Bryant, Poe. For companions, apparently, he sought out the deck-hands and pilots on the boats, or the omnibus drivers, "Broadway Jack," "Balky Bill," "Pop Rice," and the rest, by whose side he would ride, listening to their yarns, or declaiming into the street-traffic some passage, it might be, from Julius Caesar. Journalism and Literature. ror. In due time, after various experiences in carpentering and school-teaching, he became an editor. Then, in his thirtieth year, he set off with his brother on a long expedition through the middle states and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, bringing up at New Orleans, where he remained for a time in newspaper work. Thence he worked his way back, up the Mississippi, by the Great Lakes and Canada, and down the Hudson, travelling in all eight thousand miles, much of it afoot. Up to this time his journalistic and literary work was of the ordinary type and had attracted no attention. He had begun to write at twelve years of age, and some of his pieces had appeared in Morris's MirHis chief editing was done for the Brooklyn Eagle. But after thirty he became conscious of a great desire growing within him, and to accomplish this desire he resolved to put aside, if need be, the ordinary pursuits of life and forego the ordinary rewards. So well as he could formulate it to himself, it was a desire to put on record in some literary form an entire personality, a man with all his characteristics, sensual and spiritual, with his bodily sensations and appetites, and his mental and moral struggles, hopes, and dreams. Moreover, that personality was to be portrayed in the midst of the tumultuous, free, expansive, democratic American life of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Long consideration convinced him that the only way in which he could do this successfully would be by portraying his own personality, which alone he knew, and which, from its environment and experiences, might fairly be regarded as the personality of an American schooled in the world both of nature and of men, robust, energetic, free, alert, tolerant, kind. Grass." In accordance with this design, which he seemed to regard as novel, he sought some new form of expression. He discarded both metre and rhyme, and, after much dif"Leaves of ficulty, all stock poetic phrases, preserving still a poetic semblance by writing in long, uneven lines marked with a rude rhythm. He abandoned the name Walter for Walt, and "stood" for his picture with his hat on one side of his head, beard rough, blouse open at the throat, one hand on his hip and one in his trousers pocket. Yet the picture, as it may be seen in his volume, is not defiant, is even winningly modest in facial expression, betokening a character of frankness and simplicity; and Whitman exemplified his democratic simplicity by setting up the type for the first edition of his poems (1855) with his own hands. Leaves of Grass he named the volume, perhaps in symbol of the lowly, teeming, equality-loving democracy which it was his purpose to sing. "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for The Female equally with the Male I sing. "Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The audacity of the thing challenged attention, but it was not likely to win impartial criticism. played its spines, as usual, in the face The hedge-hog public of such unconvention ality, and the author became notorious if not yet famous. The book was condemned by general readers, and by many critics. And more than thirty years afterward, Whitman, within four years of death, could still complain that from a worldly point of view his book had been worse than a failure, that he had not gained the acceptance of his time, and that public criticism still showed "marked anger and contempt more than anything else." Abuse, however, is a better stimulus than neglect; there must have been something to create such a stir. Besides, Whitman had, from the first, some loyal defenders. Emerson did not reject him, nor Carlyle. There were successive editions and enlargements of his work, and in 1868 a volume of selections from his poems was edited by W. M. Rossetti in England, where the author was readily accepted by men like Swinburne, Dowden, and Symonds. The remainder of Whitman's life contains an important episode. At the close of 1862 he learned that his brother George, an officer in the army, had been wounded. He went to Virginia and became an army nurse, and from War Experi ences and Later then till after the close of the war served faithLife. fully in that capacity in the camps and hospitals about Washington. It was a fit heroic accompaniment to his heroic song, and it is almost incredible that he should have been dismissed shortly afterward from the Interior Department because an "official" disapproved of his Leaves of Grass. A vindication by an admirer, published under the title of "The Good Gray Poet," gave him an enduring sobriquet; and he was soon appointed to another clerkship. His literary work was not intermitted; the war experiences furnished him with some of the noblest passages of his poems as they now standthe Drum-Taps and the Memories of President Lincoln; and he published his prose Democratic Vistas in 1870. After a stroke of paralysis in 1873—the culmination of physical ills brought on by |