ed? How
all questions of form and art, and all other questions, sink into
insignificance beside that! The exaltation of mind and spirit shown in the
main body of Whitman's work, the genuine, prophetic fervor, the
intensification and amplification of the simple ego, and the resultant
raising of all human values, seem to me as plain as daylight.

Whitman is to be classed among the great names by the breadth and
all-inclusiveness of his theme and by his irrepressible personality. I
think it highly probable that future scholars and critics will find his
work fully as significant and era-marking as that of any of the few
supreme names of the past. It is the culmination of an age of
individualism, and, as opposites meet, it is also the best lesson in
nationalism and universal charity that this century has seen.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL

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