a country newspaper on Long Island.
He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily
impressible.

The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he
was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to
the "Democratic Review," a literary journal which numbered Bryant,
Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its
contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, "mostly in the
reading-room of Tammany Hall," and tried here and there an experiment
in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the
Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps
over Long Island. He left his position on "The Brooklyn Eagle" and
wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back to New York,
tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his father, and
brooded over a book--"a book of new things."

This was the famous "Leaves of Grass." He set the type himself, in a
Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The
book had a portrait of the author--a meditative, gray-bearded poet in
workman's clothes--and a confused preface on America as a field for the
true poet. Then followed the new gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted
in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary
readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song,
a rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought
the book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were
startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to
Whitman from Concord: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and
wisdom that America has yet contributed."

Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn,
patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then
he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled
down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital
nurse. He wrote "Drum Taps" and other magnificent poems about the War,
culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs last in the
Dooryard Bloomed." Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever
chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman
stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John
Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the
best known poets and critics of En