There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he be

came,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. There, and not in outward incidents and acts, is the real record of those years. To the casual onlooker, Whitman was an indifferent workman; a loafer many thought him. He did not continue long at any one job, and he worked at that intermittently, and only when and as he pleased. He allowed himself many days off, sometimes weeks at a stretch. But the days were not wasted or unemployed. Results were not evident at once in terms of a day's wages. If the idle weeks made the judicious grieve, they counted finally as the judicious were not able to guess. He spent much time on Long Island in the open, roaming the woods and fields, or holding intimate, mystic communion with the sea. It is difficult to define in words the quality of this ex

perience. It must be felt; and Whitman makes us feel it in his poetry. It is an essence and an effluence. Words are an affair of the intellect; whereas Whitman's relation to things was less intellectual than spiritual and actually physical. He absorbed with his body. He loved to lie naked in the wind and sun; or after bathing in the sea, he raced up and down the beach in Adamic simplicity and freshness, "declaiming Homer or Shakspere to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour." The essence of these sights, these contacts, billowing, multiform, and rhythmic as the grass, is distilled for us in Whitman's pages, through the magic of his "divine power to speak words," exhaling from them like an aroma and tactile sensation. A single incident of his boyhood, as he has recounted it in his verse, may suggest his attitude toward experience, and may serve to typify results, as he "absorbed and translated."

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower'd halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings
and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,

From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,

From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,

A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,

Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,

A reminiscence sing.

Profoundly and intimately as Whitman was penetrated by the inner meanings of nature, yet the streets and myriad-teeming life of cities were no less significant and fruitful. Always self-possessed and at ease in his big fashion in the presence of any man, he especially liked "powerful, uneducated persons," and he went freely among them; he hobnobbed with them, made them his friends and cronies. Almost daily, while living in Brooklyn and New York, after his return from the South, he crossed on the Fulton Ferry,

"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." "Besides Fulton Ferry," he continues, "off and on for years, I knew and frequented Broadway- that noted avenue of New York's

crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. . . . Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents."

One phase of these days, Whitman says, must by no means go unrecorded,—namely the Broadway omnibuses and the

"men specially identified with them, and giving vitality and meaning to them-the drivers a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race. . . . How many hours, forenoons and afternoons how many exhilarating night-times I have had — perhaps June or July, in cooler air — riding the whole length of Broadway, listening to some yarn, (and the most vivid yarns ever spun, and the rarest mimicry) — or perhaps I declaiming some stormy passage from Julius Cæsar' or 'Richard,' (you could roar as loudly as you chose in that heavy, dense, uninterrupted street-bass). Yes, I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, George Storms, Old Elephant, his brother Young Elephant, (who came afterward,) Tippy, Pop Rice,