human side could it be regarded as of weight or moment. "I do not know how I came to do it," he said: "I know I was simply in the green and crude - that's all." Franklin Evans is not a work of art. It is clumsy and inane. But while we are cataloguing we must give it a place. None of this early experimenting in Whitman's case grades up anywhere near the average of his matured utterance.

It was in the years between nineteen and thirtyfour or thirty-five that Whitman put the edge on his culture. Only those who are sympathetically familiar with Leaves of Grass can understand the full meaning of that word "education" when applied to his case. It cannot be too profoundly emphasized. To a man like him it was the most comprehensive and satisfying equipment to be conceived, though many things that the schools prescribe were not here regarded as requisite. It amounted to a species of absorption into himself of the atmosphere of the common life, in town and afield. He was lost in the cosmopolitan stream. To New York, Brooklyn, and their suburban and rustic edges he devoted the worship of this peculiar personal faith. He studied not only their "outside shows," but far more their interior heart and meaning. He studied life — men, women, and children. He travelled on equal terms with every one. He liked people and people liked him. He knew most men far better than they knew them

selves. And his apprenticeship of these years was to the concrete spiritual as well as to the abstract. Note how thoroughly conversant he became with the shops, houses, sidewalks, ferries, factories, taverns, religious assemblies, political meetings, carousings, and the vast paraphernalia of urban civilization. He had every rustic instinct for out of doors. He delighted in the phenomena of thoroughfares. But he did not lose in life the meaning of life. He knew hospitals, poorhouses, prisons, and their inmates. He passed freely in and about districts of the city which are inhabited by the worst characters. He knew evil people, and many of them knew him. He learned to tolerate squalor, vice, and ignorance. He saw the good ("there is always so much more good than the self-righteous think") and the bad that mixed in the same blood, and he realized that which would excuse and justify a wanton life. It has been said that these people, even the worst of them, while entire strangers to Walt Whitman, quite invariably received him with courtesy and gratitude. Thousands who have known the man personally or have derived equivalent impressions from his books, will dwell upon the generic magnetism of his presence. It is not surprising that he went among the ulterior classes enjoying the same unhesitating and unequivocal renown. Many of the most dubious of those characters became attached to him. His interest in the

fakir and the huckster, in the ragamuffin and the thief, in the old men and old women of the submerged tenth, was no humbug profession intended to subserve a false repute. Many men intellectu

ally apprehend democracy. But in Whitman democracy had found itself fact as well as theory. Whitman patronized nobody. Even the outcasts were to him as good as the best, though temporarily dimmed and blurred. He received the more fortunate classes on the same plane. He was equally hospitable with all. Merchants, lawyers, doctors, scholars and writers were among his friends. But the people he knew best and liked most, who knew him best and liked him most, were at neither extreme of social preference. They were the farmers, mechanics, carpenters, pilots, drivers, masons, printers, deck-hands, teamsters, drovers, and so forth, who constitute the creative background of our civilization. With these, with their wives and children, with their old mothers and fathers, exquisite relations developed. He easily adjusted his life to any circle. No man was more gallant than he in his informal way could become. He had all that was essential in the culture of four hundreds, and then, in addition, had a simple quality of direct approach which took him to the average man and kept him there a royally cherished figure.

Whitman made himself familiar with life, not by reading trade reports and statistics, or by any extra

neous or hair-splitting theory, but by loafing and living more or less with mechanics, who were often his intimate friends. He visited the foundries, shops, rolling-mills, slaughter-houses, factories, shipyards, wharves, shops, and every known hostelry of labor. He attended clam-bakes, races, auctions, weddings, sailing and bathing parties, christenings, and all shades and degrees of public and private entertainment. And he shared without constraint all pros and cons in the popular experience. He was a frequent speaker at debating societies. On Sundays he occasionally went to church. But he did not prefer one church above another, or all churches to no church. If there had been Buddhist temples, Mohammedan mosques, and Confucian joss-houses accessible, he would undoubtedly have visited those with equal interest and sympathy. He had no formal religious feeling whatever and no inclination towards any perfunctory symbolism in worship. And yet no man ever more devoutly honored religion or was more capable of apprehending the sound root of the religious life. But the religious life to him was not at all an affair necessarily of a church. It was as well an affair of the office, the loom or the scaffold.

Whitman liked to loaf in libraries and museums. There was in his youth in New York a very inclusive collection of Egyptian antiquities, and for over two years, off and on, he spent many an hour

examining it. This is noted because it serves to indicate the quiet way he had of getting to the sources of culture and perfecting his grasp of essential knowledge. He is often spoken of as unlearned. And if learning is a perfunctory exercise, gone through with to satisfy the rote of a text-book, he was unlearned. But no man had, in broad grasp of social law, drawn from basic apprehension of the sciences and of historic perspective, a more positive equipment than he possessed.

Reading did not perform any exclusive part in Walt Whitman's education. He found he could get more from things themselves than from pictures or descriptions of them drawn from others. His aim was to absorb humanity and modern life, and he neglected no means, books included, by which this aim could be furthered. A favorite mode of study with him was to take an early breakfast and then go, by stage or on foot, to some solitary spot by the seashore, generally Coney Island (conserving a very different purpose from that which it now enjoys), taking with him a knapsack containing a bit of plain food, a towel, and a book. He would spend the day in this solitude, walking, thinking, observing the sea and sky, bathing, reading, or perhaps reciting aloud Homer and Shakespeare as he walked about the beach. It would be hard to imagine a life more happily educed. He speaks of himself as "wandering, amazed" at his "own lightness and