Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III LEAVES OF GRASS " Like a f omt of type, poetry must be get up over again consistent with American, modern and democratic institutions." — Walt Whitman to a New York Herald reporter in 1888. " Yes, Walt often spoke to me of his hooks. I would tell him ' I don't know what you are trying to get at!' And this is the idea I would always arrive at from his reply. All other people in the world have had their representatives in literature : here is a great hig race with no representatives. He would undertake to furnish that representative. It was also his object to get a real human being into a book. This had never been done before." — Peter Doyle, street-car conductor and railroad man, in 1895. " A page with as true and inevitable and deep a meaning as a hillside, a book which Nature shall own as her own flower, her own leaves; with whose leaves her own shall rustle in sympathy imperishable and russet; which shall push out with the skunk-cabbage in the spring. I am not offended by the odor of the skunk [-cabbage] in passing by sacred places. I am invigorated rather. It is a reminiscence of immortality borne on the gale. O thou partial world, when wilt thou know God ? I would as soon transplant this vegetable to Polynesia or to heaven with me as the violet." — Thoreau's Journal, May, 1850. Unpublished until 1906. In the spring of 1855 Whitman dropped his saw and hammer and began to set up with hisown bands the type for his book, using the printing establishment of Andrew and James Rome at the corner of Cranberry and Fulton Streets, Brooklyn. The first drafts of his " copy " had been written in theatres or ferry-boats and omnibuses, or wherever he happened to be, but it had been revised and elaborated — as he afterward told his friend Dr. Bucke — no less than fiv...