No More Learning

With all his singularities, Whitman is a master of words and
of sounds: he has them at his command--made for, and instinct with, his
purpose--messengers of unsurpassable sympathy and intelligence between
himself and his readers. The entire book may be called the paean of the
natural man--not of the merely physical, still less of the disjunctively
intellectual or spiritual man, but of him who, being a man first and
foremost, is therein also a spirit and an intellect.

There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation of Swedenborg's:
that the whole of heaven is in the form of one man, and the separate
societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man. In a large
sense, the general drift of Whitman's writings, even down to the passages
which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or
analogy to this dogma. He takes man, and every organism and faculty of man,
as the unit--the datum--from which all that we know, discern, and
speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of concrete and
sensual, has to be computed. He knows of nothing nobler than that unit man;
but, knowing that, he can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical
extension or recast.

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.
The first immediate occasion of his going down to camp was on behalf of his
brother, Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st New York
Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a piece of shell at
Fredericksburg. From the spring of 1863 this nursing, both in the field and
more especially in hospital at Washington, became his "one daily and
nightly occupation;" and the strongest testimony is borne to his
measureless self-devotion and kindliness in the work, and to the unbounded
fascination, a kind of magnetic attraction and ascendency, which he
exercised over the patients, often with the happiest sanitary results.
Northerner or Southerner, the belligerents received the same tending from
him. It is said that by the end of the war he had personally ministered to
upwards of 100,000 sick and wounded. In a Washington hospital he caught, in
the summer of 1864, the first illness he had ever known, caused by poison
absorbed into the system in attending some of the worst cases of gangrene.
It disabled him for six months. He returned to the hospitals towards the
beginning of 1865, and obtained also a clerkship in the Department of the
Interior. It should be added that, though he never actually joined the army
as a combatant, he made a point of putting down his name on the enrolment-
lists for the draft, to take his chance as it might happen for serving the
country in arms. The reward of his devotedness came at the end of June
1865, in the form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr.
Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the _Leaves of Grass_; a
book whose outspokenness, or (as the official chief considered it)
immorality, raised a holy horror in the ministerial breast.