He
was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in
1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that
year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a carpenter,
who "leaned to the Quakers." There were many children. When
little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish him from his
father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy
had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried
typesetting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long
Island. He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional,
extraordinarily impressible.
The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two
he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories
to the "Democratic Review," a literary journal which numbered
Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among
its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, "mostly in the
reading-room of Tammany Hall," and tried here and there an
experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of
New York and the Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera
and with long tramps over Long Island.
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