Summer wanes; the children are grown:
Fun and frolic no more he knows;
Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone;
Off he flies, and we sing as he goes:
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,

Spink, spank, spink;

When you can pipe that merry old strain.
Robert of Lincoln, come back again.

Chee, chee, chee.

65

7C

WALT WHITMAN

1819-1892

Walt Whitman, "The Good Gray Poet," was during his lifetime a literary storm center, and even yet his name cannot be mentioned in any circle of readers without bringing forth both a paean of praise and a chorus of condemnation. Some one has called him the best loved and the best hated of all our writers. He had a desperately hard struggle to gain a hearing, but he persisted with a supreme and undisturbed patience and self-confidence, and triumphed in the end. As time goes on, his figure looms larger and larger on the literary horizon, so that there are many who now recognize in this so-called sensual, self-vaunting, unlettered hoodlum of Manhattan, the one universally great literary genius produced by American democracy.

Whitman was born May 31, 1819, at the old family homestead, West Hills, near Huntington, Long Island. His father came from a line of English yeomen who had long been established in America, and his mother was descended from the Holland-Dutch family of Van Velsor, which had a similarly long residence in this country. They were of the simple, unlettered farming and seafaring classes, and made little pretension to material prosperity or social standing. Whitman was always unfeignedly proud of his humble origin, for he knew that he came from a plain, strong, virile, healthy, American stock, and thus as a true son of the soil he might claim to be the appointed poet of democracy.

"Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect mother,"

he says; and again,

"My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here, from parents

the same, and their parents the same."

In this old home on Long Island, or Paumanok, as he loved to call it, the child lived until he was four years old, absorbing even at this age the rural sights and sounds, the vigor and freshness of the salt sea air, and the power and constancy

TO VIMU

of the ocean. Truly the sea was "the cradle endlessly rocking" for this child of Nature. During the child's fifth year, his father removed to Brooklyn to engage in the builder's trade, but the boy still had free access to the ancestral home and to the wild and unfrequented parts of the island. There are hundreds of allusions that prove Walt was a great deal more of a country-bred than a citybred boy.

His education in the public schools of Brooklyn closed when he was thirteen. He began now to help earn his own bread by working in a lawyer's office as an errand boy. He soon entered upon an apprenticeship to the printer's trade, however, and until his seventeenth year found employment in various capacities in printing establishments. Then for two or three years he taught country schools on Long Island, boarding around, as was the custom, and familiarizing himself with the life of the common people. He was a prime favorite with old and young, playing ball with the boys and engaging in his favorite sport of fishing as opportunity afforded. It is said that he succeeded admirably as a teacher, using a sort of oral method of his own invention, and commanding always the respect and affection of his pupils and patrons. Then he opened a printing office at Huntington and founded a weekly paper, The Long Islander. His success in this venture was not pronounced, and the paper soon changed hands, but this was the beginning of his career as a journalist. He now contributed sentimental sketches and stories to some of the New York papers, and worked in a desultory sort of way at his trade of printing. This was his fallow or loafing period, as he called it. He was studying men and women in real life with all the intensity and constancy of application that many another youth puts on his college course. The city streets and the country lanes, filled with all sorts and conditions of life, were Walt Whitman's university. He was exceedingly fond of the theater and opera, too, and he managed to see and hear a great many of the foremost actors and singers of his time.

Whitman was progressing slowly in his chosen field of journalism, and in 1848 he became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a daily paper of some importance. He had been composing a great deal of conventional prose and verse, among other things many tales after the manner of Hawthorne