But the triumph of her art consists in her facile
handling of simple incidents and everyday men and women and her power to
carry them without a hint of sentimentality to a natural, artistic,
effective climax, heightened usually by a touch of either humor or pathos.
WALT WHITMAN, 1819-1892
[Illustration: WALT. WHITMAN]
Life.--Suffolk County, Long Island, in which is situated the village of
West Hills, where Walt Whitman was born in 1819, was in some ways the most
remarkable eastern county in the United States. Hemmed in on a narrow strip
of land by the ocean on one side and Long Island Sound on the other, the
inhabitants saw little of the world unless they led a seafaring life. Many
of the well-to-do farmers, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century,
never took a land journey of more than twenty miles from home. Because of
such restricted environment, the people of Suffolk County were rather
insular in early days, yet the average grade of intelligence was high, for
some of England's most progressive blood had settled there in the first
half of the seventeenth century.
Nowhere else in this country, not even at the West, was there a greater
feeling of independence and a more complete exercise of individuality.
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