Excerpt: ... WALT WHITMAN. I.-HIS PERSONALITY. Those who regard Whitman as being the most representative Bard of Democracy, of its innermost ideas, of its moving forces, of its hopes and destiny, must find an interest in tracing the early influences which helped to mould the poet's body and character. The modern scientific doctrine of the effect of environment is enforced and enlarged by Whitman himself; for he sees not only in social circumstances, in political constitutions, and in daily human contact, but in the earth and sky, the rivers and trees, silent influences which pass into man's being and affect his whole future. As Wordsworth found "beauty born of murmuring sound" passing into Lucy's face, so does Whitman discover "persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands" all contributing their elements to form the spiritual life of man. How natural, therefore, that we should turn to Whitman's early life to discover what were those agencies which stamped his nature with their seal. A On his father's side Whitman was of good English stock, possessed of what he terms "the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be."l Dr. Bucke tells us that the earliest lineal ancestor of Whitman he is able to trace was born in England about 1560. This person's son sailed from England in 1635, and lived at Milford, Connecticut, whence his son, some time before 1660, passed over to Long Island. At West Hills, in Long Island, the poet's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father lived; and he himself was born there on the 31st May, 1819. Dr. Bucke describes the Whitmans as ' a solid, tall, strong-framed, long-lived race of men, moderate of speech, friendly, fond of their land and of horses and cattle, sluggish in their passions, but fearful when once started." 3 Several of them were soldiers under Washington in the Revolutionary War. The poet's father had learnt, as a youth, the carpenter's trade, was...
