In his prose work, _Specimen Days and Collect_, which all who
are interested in his autobiography should read, he says, "The successive
growth stages of my infancy, childhood, youth, and manhood were all pass'd
on Long Island, which I sometimes feel as if I had incorporated."
Like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman received from the schools only a common
education but from life he had an uncommon training. His chief education
came from associating with all sorts and conditions of people. In Brooklyn
he worked as a printer, carpenter, and editor. His closest friends were the
pilots and deck hands of ferry boats, the drivers of New York City
omnibuses, factory hands, and sailors. After he had become well known, he
was unconventional enough to sit with a street car driver in front of a
grocery store in a crowded city and eat a watermelon. When people smiled,
he said, "They can have the laugh--we have the melon."
[Illustration: WHITMAN AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-SIX]
His Suffolk County life might have left him democratic but insular; but he
traveled widely and gained cosmopolitan experience. In 1848 he went
leisurely to New Orleans, where he edited a newspaper, but in a short time
he journeyed north along the Mississippi, traveled in Canada, and finally
returned to New York, having completed a trip of eight thousand miles.
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