In the spring of 1838, we find him again at Huntington; and here, in June,[63] he founded a weekly journal, the Long Islander, which is still published. Full of interests, self-sufficient and ready with his pen, and in close touch with his readers, he conducted the paper for a while with success. He was nineteen and an enthusiast; and he was both printer, editor and publisher.
Like others of the time, his paper was probably a humble sheet of four small pages, and his task was not so heavy as it may sound. He thoroughly enjoyed the work, as well he might: the new responsibility and independence were admirably suited to his years and temper. He purchased a press and type, and his printing house was in the upper story of what is now a stable, which stood on the main street of the town.
There he did most of the work himself, but I have talked with an old man who shared his task at times. And not his task only; for the printing room was, we may be sure, the scene of much beside labour. Walt loved companionship, and was an excellent story-teller; he loved games, especially whist, which he would play—and generally win—for a pumpkin pie. But when he worked, he “worked like the mischief,” as the saying is;[64] and when he said so his companions knew that they must go. They must have recognised, if they thought about him at all in that way, that while he made no display of his knowledge he knew far more than they, and while he was an excellent comrade, it would not do to treat Walt with too great familiarity.
As to his talk, it was clean and wholesome and self-respecting. He was too much of a man already to resort to the mannish tricks of many youths. He had, moreover, at this time, a tinge of Puritanism, which did him no harm: he neither smoked nor drank nor swore. He contemned practical jokes. Maybe there was less of Puritanism about him than of personal pride. He was himself from the beginning, belonged to no set, and went his own ways. He seemed to be everywhere and to observe everything without obtruding himself anywhere. And having purchased a horse, he carried the papers round to the doors of his readers in the surrounding townships. Often, afterwards, he recalled those long romantic drives along the glimmering roads, through the still fields and the dark oak woods under the half-luminous starry sky, broken by friendly faces and kind greetings.
But before the year was out the appearance of the Long Islander became more and more irregular, till the patience of its owner and subscribers was exhausted. In the spring it ceased for a time, and when it reappeared it was numbered as a fresh venture under new management.
Walt had gone back to school teaching at Babylon.[65] He continued this work for two years more, wandering from place to place, now at the Jamaica Academy, now at Woodbury, now at Whitestone. He was, at this time, a keen debater and politician, an Abolitionist, a Washingtonian teetotaler, and ardently opposed to capital punishment. He took an active share in the stump oratory of 1840, when Van Buren of New York was for the second time the Democratic nominee for President. The fact, with the knowledge he always showed of the art of oratory, and the plans for lecturing which he afterwards drafted, seems to testify to a native capacity for public speaking, as well as a genuine and serious interest in the affairs of the nation.
Walt Whitman was becoming recognised as a young man of ability: in spite of his nonchalant and friendly unassuming ways, he had pride and ambition. He felt in himself that he was capable of great things, and that it was time to begin them. Not very clear as to what his proper work might be, he took the turning of his inclination, and early in the summer of 1841 entered the office of the New World, as a compositor,[66] to become for the next twenty years one of the fraternity of New York pressmen.
His first success was achieved in the August number of the Democratic Review, one of the first American periodicals of the day, which counted among its contributors such writers as Bryant, Whittier, Hawthorne and Longfellow. His “Death in the Schoolroom,”[67] appearing over the initials of “W. W.,” caught the public fancy, and was widely copied by the provincial press. It is the study of a gruesome incident in Long Island country life; by turns sentimental and violent in its horror, and evidently intended as an argument against school flogging. It has a sort of crude power and its subject matter would have appealed to Hawthorne. It is by no means discreditable; but to us it seems verbose, and it is clumsy in its exaggerated style. Lugare is shown to us at one moment standing as though transfixed by a basilisk—and at another, “every limb quivers like the tongue of a snake”.