BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Burroughs. (1837——.) Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, New York, 1867; Wake-Robin, 1871; Winter Sunshine, 1875; Birds and Poets, 1877; Locusts and Wild Honey, 1879; Pepacton, 1881; Fresh Fields, 1884; Signs and Seasons, 1886; Indoor Studies, 1889; Riverby, 1894; Whitman, a Study, 1896; The Light of Day, 1900; Literary Values, 1904; Far and Near, 1904; Ways of Nature, 1905; Leaf and Tendril, 1908; Time and Change, 1912; The Summit of the Years, 1913; Our Friend John Burroughs. By Clara Barrus. 1914.
John Muir. (1838–1914.) "Studies in the Sierras," a series of papers in Scribner's Monthly, 1878; The Mountains of California, 1894; Our National Parks, 1901; Stickeen, the Story of a Dog, 1909; My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911; The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 1913; Letters to a Friend, 1915.
William Hamilton Gibson. (1850–1896.) Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making, 1876; Pastoral Days, or Memories of a New England Year, 1882; Highways and Byways, or Saunterings in New England, 1883; Happy Hunting Grounds, a Tribute to the Woods and Fields, 1886; Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine, 1890; Sharp Eyes, 1891; Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms, 1895.
Charles Conrad Abbott. (1843——.) The Stone Age in New Jersey, 1876; Primitive Industry, 1881; A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 1884; Upland and Meadow, 1886; Wasteland Wanderings, 1887; Days out of Doors, 1889; Outings at Odd Times, 1890; Recent Rambles, 1892; Outings in a Tree-Top, 1894; The Birds About Us, 1894; Notes of the Night, 1895; Birdland Echoes, 1896; The Freedom of the Fields, 1898; Clear Skies and Cloudy, 1899; In Nature's Realm, 1900.
"Olive Thorne Miller"—Harriet Mann Miller. (1831——.) Little Folks in Feathers and Fur, 1879; Queer Pets at Marcy's, 1880; Bird Ways, 1885; In Nesting Time, 1888; Four Handed Folk, 1890; Little Brothers of the Air, 1890; Bird-Lover in the West, 1894; Upon the Tree Tops, 1896; The First Book of Birds, 1899; True Bird Stories, 1903; With the Birds in Maine, 1904; and others.
Bradford Torrey. (1843–1912.) Birds in the Bush, 1885; A Rambler's Lease, 1889; The Foot-Path Way, 1892; A Florida Sketch-Book, 1894; Spring Notes from Tennessee, 1896; A World of Green Hills, 1898; Every-Day Birds, 1900; Footing It in Franconia, 1900; The Clerk of the Woods, 1903; Nature's Invitation, 1904; Friends on the Shelf, 1906.
Florence Merriam Bailey. (1863——.) Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889; My Summer in a Mormon Village, 1895; A Birding on a Bronco, 1896; Birds of Village and Field, 1898; Handbook of Birds of Western United States, 1902.
Frank Bolles. (1856–1894.) Land of the Lingering Snow, 1891; At the North of Bearcamp Water: Chronicles of a Stroller in New England from July to December, 1893; From Blomidon to Smoky, 1895.
[CHAPTER IX]
WALT WHITMAN
Whitman and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental movement, pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them voices in the wilderness crying to deaf or angry ears, both of them unheeded until a new generation had arisen to whom they had become but names and books. Thoreau was born in 1817; Whitman in 1819, the year of Lowell, Story, Parsons, Herman Melville, J. G. Holland, Julia Ward Howe, and E. P. Whipple, and of the Victorians, Kingsley, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his first significant volume, in 1855, the year of Hiawatha, of Maud, and of Arnold's Poems. He issued it again in 1856 and again in 1860—a strange nondescript book rendered all the more strange by the fact, thoroughly advertised in the second edition, that it had won from Emerson the words: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.... I greet you at the beginning of a great career." But even the compelling name of Emerson could not sell the book; little notice, in fact, was taken of it save as a few voices expressed horror and anger; and when in 1862 Whitman became lost in the confusion of the war, he had made not so much impression upon America as had Thoreau at the time of his death that same year. Until well into the seventies Walt Whitman seemed only a curious phenomenon in an age grown accustomed to curious phenomena.
The antecedents and the early training of Whitman were far from literary. He came from a race of Long Island farmers who had adhered to one spot for generations. No American was ever more completely a product of our own soil.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here,
From parents the same, and their parents' parents the same.
They were crude, vigorous plowmen, unbookish and elemental. The father was the first to break from the soil and the ancestral environment, but he left it only to become a laborer on buildings in the neighboring city of Brooklyn.
The boyhood of Whitman was passed in the city, though with long vacations in the home of his grandparents on Long Island. His schooling was brief and desultory. He left the schools at twelve to become office boy for a lawyer and from that time on he drifted aimlessly from one thing to another, serving for brief periods as doctor's clerk, compositor in a country printing office, school teacher in various localities, editor and proprietor of a rural weekly, stump speaker in the campaign of 1840, editor of various small journals, contributor of Hawthornesque stories and sketches to papers and magazines, writer of a melodramatic novel, and in 1846 editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But he could hold to nothing long. In 1848 he was induced by a stranger who had taken a fancy to him to go to New Orleans as editor of the Crescent newspaper, but within a year he was back again in New York, where for the next few years he maintained a half-loafing, half-working connection with several papers and periodicals.
It was during this period that he made himself so thoroughly familiar with the middle and lower strata of New York City life. He spent hours of every day riding on Broadway vehicles and on Fulton ferry boats and making himself boon companion of all he met. He knew the city as Muir knew the peaks and mountain gardens of the Sierra, and he took the same delight in discovering a new specimen of humanity on a boat or an omnibus that Muir might take in finding a new plant on an Alaska glacier.
I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, George Storms, Old Eliphant, his brother, Young Eliphant (who came afterward), Tippy, Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Callahan, Patsey Dee, and dozens more; for there were hundreds. They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good will and honor, under all circumstances.[85]
Almost daily, later ('50 to '60), I cross'd on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath—the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day—hurrying, splashing sea-tides—the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes.... My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere—how well I remember them all.[86]
* * * * *
I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords.[86]
The earlier Whitman is a man par excellence of the city as Muir is of the mountains and Thoreau of the woods.