There was a certainty about life and opinions, a feeling of relationship
with everybody, a defiance of convention, that made Suffolk County the fit
birthplace of a man who was destined to trample poetic conventions under
his feet and to sing the song of democracy. In Walt Whitman's young days,
all sorts and conditions of men on Long Island met familiarly on equal
terms. The farmer, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the mason, the
woodchopper, the sailor, the clergyman, the teacher, the young college
student home on his vacation,--all mingled as naturally as members of a
family. No human being felt himself inferior to any one else, so long as
the moral proprieties were observed. Nowhere else did there exist a more
perfect democracy of conscious equals. Although Whitman's family moved to
Brooklyn before he was five years old, he returned to visit relatives, and
later taught school at various places on Long Island and edited a paper at
Huntington, near his birthplace. In various ways Suffolk County was
responsible for the most vital part of his early training. In his poem,
_There Was a Child Went Forth_, he tells how nature educated him in his
island home.
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