I
Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, May 30, 1819, and died
at Camden, N. J., March 26, 1892. Though born in the country, most of his
life was passed in cities; first in Brooklyn and New York, then in New
Orleans, then in Washington, and lastly in Camden, where his body is
buried. It was a poet's life from first to last,--free, unhampered,
unworldly, unconventional, picturesque, simple, untouched by the craze of
money-getting, unselfish, devoted to others, and was, on the whole,
joyfully and contentedly lived. It was a pleased and interested saunter
through the world,--no hurry, no fever, no strife; hence no bitterness, no
depletion, no wasted energies. A farm boy, then a school-teacher, then a
printer, editor, writer, traveler, mechanic, nurse in the army hospitals,
and lastly government clerk; large and picturesque of figure, slow of
movement; tolerant, passive, receptive, and democratic,--of the people; in
all his tastes and attractions, always aiming to walk abreast with the
great laws and forces, and to live thoroughly in the free, nonchalant
spirit of his own day and land. His strain was mingled Dutch and English,
with a decided Quaker tinge, which came from his mother's side, and which
had a marked influence upon his work.
The spirit that led him to devote his time and substance to the sick and
wounded soldiers during the war may be seen in that earlier incident in
his life when he drove a Broadway stage all one winter, that a disabled
driver might lie by without starving his family. It is from this episode
that the tradition of his having been a New York stage-driver comes. He
seems always to have had a special liking for this class of workmen. One
of the house surgeons of the old New York Hospital relates that in the
latter part of the fifties Whitman was a frequent visitor to that
institution, looking after and ministering to disabled stage-drivers.
"These drivers," says the doctor, "like those of the omnibuses in London,
were a set of men by themselves. A good deal of strength, intelligence,
and skillful management of horses was required of a Broadway stage-driver.
He seems to have been decidedly a higher order of man than the driver of
the present horse-cars. He usually had his primary education in the
country, and graduated as a thorough expert in managing a very difficult
machine, in an exceptionally busy thoroughfare.
"It was this kind of a man that so attracted Walt Whitman that he was
constantly to be seen perched on the box alongside one of them going up
and down Broadway. I often watched the poet and driver, as probably did
many another New Yorker in those days.
"I do not wonder as much now as I did in 1860 that a man like Walt Whitman
became interested in these drivers. He was not interested in the news of
every-day life--the murders and accidents and political convulsions--but
he was interested in strong types of human character. We young men had not
had experience enough to understand this kind of a man. It seems to me now
that we looked at Whitman simply as a kind of crank, if the word had then
been invented. His talk to us was chiefly of books, and the men who wrote
them: especially of poetry, and what he considered poetry. He never said
much of the class whom he visited in our wards, after he had satisfied
himself of the nature of the injury and of the prospect of recovery.
"Whitman appeared to be about forty years of age at that time. He was
always dressed in a blue flannel coat and vest, with gray and baggy
trousers. He wore a woolen shirt, with a Byronic collar, low in the neck,
without a cravat, as I remember, and a large felt hat. His hair was iron
gray, and he had a full beard and mustache of the same color. His face and
neck were bronzed by exposure to the sun and air. He was large, and gave
the impression of being a vigorous man. He was scrupulously careful of his
simple attire, and his hands were soft and hairy."
During the early inception of "Leaves of Grass" he was a carpenter in
Brooklyn, building and selling small frame-houses to working people. He
frequently knocked off work to write his poems. In his life Whitman was
never one of the restless, striving sort. In this respect he was not
typical of his countrymen. All his urgency and strenuousness he reserved
for his book. He seems always to have been a sort of visitor in life,
noting, observing, absorbing, keeping aloof from all ties that would hold
him, and making the most of the hour and the place in which he happened to
be. He was in no sense a typical literary man. During his life in New York
and Brooklyn, we see him moving entirely outside the fashionable circles,
the learned circles, the literary circles, the money-getting circles. He
belongs to no set or club. He is seen more with the laboring
classes,--drivers, boatmen, mechanics, printers,--and I suspect may often
be found with publicans and sinners. He is fond of the ferries and of the
omnibuses. He is a frequenter of the theatre and of the Italian opera.
Alboni makes a deep and lasting impression upon him. It is probably to her
that he writes these lines:--
"Here take this gift,
I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, general,
One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the progress
and freedom of the race,
Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;
But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to
any."