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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 homestead. 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

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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even give it away,-for complimentary copies, we are told, were in many instances returned, often accompanied by insulting letters. The book was considered meaningless, badly written, filthy, atheistical and utterly reprehensible. The second edition contained a number of new poems and met with a worse reception even than the first. Fowler and Wells undertook its publication, but the clamor was so loud that they almost at once threw up their contract, and the issue was continued by the author. However, there was little or no sale, and for a time "Leaves of Grass" seemed to be dead.

Whitman, however, was not, it seems, the least discouraged. He probably foresaw the reception the book must meet. He went on his way as joyous and sympathetic as ever. Indeed the poems written during the next few years were, if possible, more exultant and optimistic than those of the two first editions. Then, in 1860, Thayer and Eldridge of Boston published the third edition, which had as its frontispiece portrait number three, which is a steel engraving from an oil painting made by Charles Hine, an artist friend of the poet's. With the publication of this third edition began such mod

erate measure of success as "Leaves of Grass" has so far seen. The book began to sell. There was a lull in the storm of refusal which greeted the earlier editions. It seemed as if the "Leaves" were about to strike root and flourish. Then came the war. The book business was ruined, Thayer and Eldridge failed, and "Leaves of Grass" was once more out of print.

Portrait number four presents to us the poet as he was shortly after the issue of the third edition of his poems. Number three may have been taken a year or two before it was used in 1860. I have the authority of Whitman himself for the date of number four; it was probably taken at the end of 1860, number three having been painted, say, in 1857 or 1858. Number five was taken in 1861, in the early months. of the war, that war which was to affect the poet so vitally; and (by what I suppose is an odd coincidence) his attitude and aspect in this photograph are as if the shadow of the national catastrophe, which was

NUMBER 8.

to crush him as well as so many thousand others, was already falling upon him and darkening his life. The same may be said of number six as of number five. Taken in the second year of the war, it shows or seems to show the poet suffering acutely (as he undoubtedly did suffer) under the calamity that had fallen upon his country. A large part of "Drum-Taps" must have been written this year, since he left the manuscript in New York, when he went to the front, in December, 1862.

From that date until the end of the war, and even for some time after the war had ended, he devoted himself day and night, body and soul, to the

alleviation of the suffering of the sick and wounded men on the battlefields and in the hospitals in and about Washington. His Washington. His work in those years has never been realized and perhaps never will or can be realized. O'Connor, who was there and knew it well, has attempted to depict it. He

says:

"How can I tell the nature and extent of that sublime ministration? During those years Washington was a city in whose unbuilt places and around whose borders were thickly planted dense white clusters of barracks. These were the hospitals

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neat, orderly, rectangular, strange towns, whose every citizen lay drained with sickness or wrung with pain. There, in those long wards, in rows. of cots on either side, were stretched in all attitudes and aspects of mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted guish, of death, the martyrs of the war; and among them, with a soul that tenderly remembered the little chilAGE 49, 1868. dren in many a dwelling mournful of those fathers, the worn and anxious wives haggard with thinking of those husbands, the girls weeping their spirits from their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who, from afar, yearned to the bedsides of those sons, walked Walt Whitman, in the spirit. of Christ, soothing, healing, consoling, restoring, night and day, for years, never failing, never tiring, constant, vigilant, faithful. At the red aceldama of Fredericksburg, he is in a hospital on the banks of the Rappahannock; he soothes, he comforts, he consoles, he assists to lift the wounded into the ambulances; he

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