ng in the fields, while sitting on the tops
of omnibuses. His physical materials were the stubs of pencils, the
backs of used envelopes, scraps of paper that easily came to hand. The
same open-air workshops and like crude tools of writing he utilized
for nearly forty years. During the thirty-seven years that intervened
between the first printing of his Leaves and his death in 1892, he
followed as his chief purpose in life the task he had set himself at
the beginning of his serious authorship--the cumulative expression of
personality in the larger sense which is manifest in the successive
and expanding editions of his Leaves of Grass. That book becomes
therefore, a life history. Incompletely as he may have performed this
self-imposed task, his own explanation of his purpose may well be
accepted as made in good faith. That explanation appears in the
preface to the 1876 edition, and amid the multitude of paper scraps
that came into the possession of his executors, following his passing
away, may be found similar clues:

"It was originally my intention, after chanting in Leaves of Grass the
songs of the body and of existence, to then compose a further,
equally-needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and
conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul
govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the
theme of my first chants, to shift the slides and exhibit the problem
and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed personality
entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law,
and with cheerful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation,
but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the
greater part of existence, and something that life is at least as much
for, as it is for itself."

Too long for repetition here, but important in the same connection for
a full understanding of Walt Whitman's motives, is that Backward
Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, wherein he summed up his work in fourteen
pages of prose, and with frank egotism appended this anecdote in a
footnote on the first page thereof: "When Champollion, on his death
bed, handed to the printer the revised proof of his Egyptian Grammar,
he said gayly, 'Be careful of this--it is my _carte de visite_ to
posterity.'"

Undaunted when ridicule poured over him, evenly tranquil when abuse
assailed him, unemotional when praise was lavished upon him,
unfalteringly and undeviatingly