Let us next obtain some idea of what this most remarkable poet--the founder
of _American_ poetry rightly to be so called, and the most sonorous poetic
voice of the tangibilities of actual and prospective democracy--is in his
proper life and person.

Walt Whitman was born at the farm-village of West Hills, Long Island, in
the State of New York, and about thirty miles distant from the capital, on
the 31st of May 1819. His father's family, English by origin, had already
been settled in this locality for five generations. His mother, named
Louisa van Velsor, was of Dutch extraction, and came from Cold Spring,
Queen's County, about three miles from West Hills. "A fine-looking old
lady" she has been termed in her advanced age. A large family ensued from
the marriage. The father was a farmer, and afterwards a carpenter and
builder; both parents adhered in religion to "the great Quaker iconoclast,
Elias Hicks." Walt was schooled at Brooklyn, a suburb of New York, and
began life at the age of thirteen, working as a printer, later on as a
country teacher, and then as a miscellaneous press-writer in New York. From
1837 to 1848 he had, as Mr. Burroughs too promiscuously expresses it,
"sounded all experiences of life, with all their passions, pleasures, and
abandonments." In 1849 he began travelling, and became at New Orleans a
newspaper editor, and at Brooklyn, two years afterwards, a printer. He next
followed his father's business of carpenter and builder. In 1862, after the
breaking-out of the great Civil War, in which his enthusiastic unionism and
also his anti-slavery feelings attached him inseparably though not
rancorously to the good cause of the North, he undertook the nursing of the
sick and wounded in the field, writing also a correspondence in the _New
York Times_. I am informed that it was through Emerson's intervention that
he obtained the sanction of President Lincoln for this purpose of charity,
with authority to draw the ordinary army rations; Whitman stipulating at
the same time that he would not receive any remuneration for his services.