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pernicious, and ruin and poverty are too often found treading in the footsteps of those who depend on occasional employment. To see the benefit that has arisen to those who removed to our manufactories it would be necessary to have looked into their dwellings and around their premises previously to their removal. But it is sufficient now to look at those in similar situations to what these were in, to see the contrast. We see the manufacturers well fed and genteelly clothed. Often have I been told, when inquiring if all their children. went to Sunday school, that a family had been lately employed whose children had not clothes suitable to appear in, but they would soon have them well clothed, when they would attend. I have frequently been told of persons who entered an establishment when first able to earn anything and who have constantly worked at the same establishment. Some have saved a few hundred, and some a few thousand dollars; their education has not been neglected; habits of industry are formed, and they are becoming and have become valuable members of society. These people are from what we call the laboring classes of the community, and it is with other laboring people that I compare them.

"Much has been said relative to the characters of the females employed in the factories. The information I have obtained on this subject is highly gratifying. I have often been told of mills which have been in operation for many years, and there had never been an instance known of unchaste or improper conduct. There prevails among the females an ambition to sustain a good moral character. There is a watchfulness among them, and they quickly detect an immoral. intruder when sometimes the proprietors have been negligent or deceived. The introduction of the power loom by bringing more imme

diately together so many girls of larger growth and the high wages that have been obtained have contributed more than any other thing to form their character for good conduct. The work is not laborious. From the wages received, being more than could be obtained by the hitherto ordinary occupations of housework, they are enabled to dress with more neatness and taste. The occupation has been daily becoming more respectable and we find among the most deserving of the laboring community. I do not mean to say that these observations will apply universally, but generally as far as my observations have gone and from personal inquiry I believe they are correct. I have been somewhat acquainted with manufactories for eighteen years, and am highly gratified in finding such great improvement in the appearance and condition of the operatives. From all I have seen and heard, I am happy to say, and I say it with sincerity, that our manufactories as now conducted have a tendency to improve the morals of the laboring people, that they will be more industrious and more intelligent-consequently more. happy and better citizens."

Perhaps we cannot better leave this traveller of seventy years ago than by quoting from his diary of January 2, 1828: "Forty-one years bygone, saith my mother, came I-poor I-into this troublesome world. My sun has past its meridian and is fast descending. 'Alas, poor Yorick!' You have much to account for and very little to show on a settlement. Forty-one years gone never to return. Soon, very

soon, it will be said, C. H. is dead! and what does he leave to tell he ever lived? Children he has none! Several persons he esteems as his friends, a wife he loves, parents he reveres, is thankful for favors received, and supplicates heaven for a continuance of its mercies."

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NUMBER 2.

1856. farmers, stock-raisers and sailors. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather Whitman were all born in the same house, which still stood only a few years ago at West Hills, Long Island. The poet himself was born in a more modern house close to the old home

stead. For many generations, dating back a hundred years before the American Revolution, the Whitmans owned a large tract of property in that neighborhood, where they lived in patriarchal style surrounded by large families and by numerous black, woolly-headed slaves. Whitman's mother's family, the Van Velsors, lived on their own land a few miles away, at a place called Cold Springs. His mother's mother's family (named Williams) were a race of sailors. So also were his mother's father's mother's family, the Kossabones. Go back as far as we may, there is no sign of scholastic habits or of literary traits among his people in any direction, unless it be in the case of his great

grandfather's great-grandfather, Zachariah Whitman, born 1595, who was a clergyman. The poet's brothers and sisters were as innocent of literary propensities as were any of their ancestors, and this in spite of the fact that two of his brothers, George and Jeff, were exceedingly able men, who rose by sheer ability from the status of day laborers to wealth, reputation and influence.

In this connection it should never be forgotten that Walt Whitman himself is about the most unliterary of all writers. He was not a student, not a reader, had little or no taste for letters. He never had many books, and those he had were in some back room or thrown in an out-of-the-way corner. He did not care for literature as such at all, could hardly read Tennyson, could not read Browning or Swinburne, probably never in his life read such a book as Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" or Macaulay's "England" or Rawlinson's "Herodotus" or Bacon's "Organon" or Carlyle's "Frederic," as so many thousands have done for the pure love of reading. It is doubtful, though he often spoke and wrote about Carlyle, whether he ever read through his "French Revolution" or even his "Sartor Resartus."

Whitman's business was to live a

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life and put that life on record. This business he attended to day in and day out for at least fifty years, since he probably entered consciously upon it quite early in life. Not only "Leaves of Grass," but all his prose-everything he ever wrote-is in one sense or another autobiographic; it all hinges and turns upon himself. He says somewhere that he writes nothing but his own name, that he repeats it over and over: "It never tires me."

Though the Whitmans had been well off, the poet's father was a poor man, who maintained a large family

AGE 41.

upon his daily wages as a carpenter. Walt Whitman and his brothers and sisters, as before intimated, belonged distinctly to the laboring class. Jesse and Andrew (two of the brothers) were never anything but day laborers. Hannah married a landscape painter, and Mary a ship carpenter. The poet himself was a printer, a school teacher, a newspaper editor, a carpenter and a house builder. Later he was a government clerk in Washington, after having been for two years an unpaid nurse in the hospitals, during which time he earned his bread

NUMBER 5. AGE 42, 1861. writing letters to New York newspapers.

Before reaching the age of thirty, Walt Whitman had written a number of stories and sketches, including a long temperance tale called "Franklin Evans." If we gauged him by these, we should have to say, "This man will never do anything above mediocrity." Nevertheless, at the age of thirty-four to thirty-five he produced, Emerson being the judge, "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has contributed." How shall we account for this? What was it that converted this mediocre man, this house builder and carpenter, this carpenter's son, into the deepest thinker his country had produced? We are reminded by this case of another at which "many were astonished, and said, Is not this the carpenter's son, whence has this man these things? and they were offended at him." What had happened to cause the change?

Walt Whitman (page 15 of the 1855 edition of "Leaves of Grass") tells us what had occurred. He tells us of a marvellous rebirth which happened to him in June, 1853, in the beginning of his thirty-fifth year. He relates how his other new self came to him and

took possession of him, and how there swiftly arose and spread around him the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth, and how it came to him that all the men ever born were his brothers and the women his sisters and lovers, and how he saw that the basic fact of creation (its "kelson") is love. From that moment this carpenter too became a seer, the heavens were opened unto him also, and he saw and knew the Spirit of God. In this case also, as in others of the same class, there was, upon illumination, a characteristic brightness of the face, an irrepressible joyousness shining from his features and seeming to pervade his whole body. If I am not mistaken, something of this spiritual elevation can still be seen (though at four or five removes from its origin) in likeness number one, which must have been taken within a few months after the June day referred to.

Between the date of number one and number two, the first and second editions of "Leaves of Grass" were written and published. The first edition, in spite of Emerson's indorsement, failed to sell; its author could not

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