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.

I

A jungle of writings has sprung up about Whitman; as many as four biographies of him have appeared in a single year, yet aside from two or three careful studies, like those of Perry and Carpenter, no really scholarly or unbiased work has been issued. Before the last word can be spoken of the poet there must be an adequate text with variorum readings and chronological arrangement. The present definitive edition is a chaos, almost useless for purposes of study. New and old are mixed indiscriminatingly. The "Chants Democratic," for instance, of the earlier editions have been dismembered and scattered from end to end of the book. All of the older poems were in constant state of revision from edition to edition, until now patches from every period of the poet's life may be found on many of them. Large sections of the earlier editions were omitted, enough indeed at one time and another to make up a volume. The fact is important, since the material rejected by a poet at different stages in his evolution often tells much concerning his art.

There is, moreover, a strange dearth of biographical material at critical points in Whitman's life, notably during that formative period preceding the first issue of Leaves of Grass. In his later years he talked of his own experiences and aims and ideals with the utmost freedom; through Traubel, his Boswell, he put himself on record with minuteness; his poetic work is all autobiographical; and almost all of his editions are prefaced by long explanations and defenses, yet of the really significant periods of his life we know little. A crude man of the people, a Broadway rough, as he described himself, who has been writing very ordinary poems and stories and editorials—how ordinary we can easily judge, for very many of them have been preserved—suddenly brings out a book of poems as unlike any earlier work of his or any previous work of his nation or language as an issue of the Amaranth or the Gem would be unlike the book of Amos. What brought about this remarkable climax? Was it the result of an evolution within the poet's soul, an evolution extending over a period of years? Did it come as a sudden inspiration or as a deliberate consummation after a study of models? We do not know. There are no contemporary letters, no transition poems, no testimony of any friend to whom the poet laid bare his soul. At one period we have verses like these:

We are all docile dough-faces,
They knead us with the fist,
They, the dashing Southern lords,
We labor as they list;
For them we speak—or hold our tongues,
For them we turn and twist.

Then suddenly without warning we have this:

Free, fresh, savage,
Fluent, luxuriant, self-content, fond of persons and places,
Fond of fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Fond of the sea—lusty-begotten and various,
Boy of the Mannahatta, the city of ships, my city,