WALT WHITMAN.

WALT WHITMAN was born in Westhills, Long Island, May 31, 1819, in a farm-house which overlooked the sea. While yet a child his parents moved to Brooklyn, where he acquired his education. He learned type-setting at thirteen years of age, two years later he taught a country school. He contributed to the Democratic Review before he was twenty-one years old. At thirty he traveled through the Western States, and spent one year in New Orleans editing a newspaper. Returning home he took up his father's occupation as carpenter and builder, which he followed for a while. During the War of the Rebellion he spent most of his time in the hospitals and camps, in the relief of the sick and disabled soldiers. For a time he was a department clerk in Washington.

In 1856 he published a volume entitled Leaves of Grass. This volume shows unquestionable power, and great originality, and contains passages of a very objectionable character, so much so, that no defense that is valid can be set up. His labors among the sick and wounded necessarily made great impressions; these took form in his mind and were published under the title of Drum Taps.

His poems lack much of coming up to the standard

He has a style peculiar to

of recognized poetic measure. himself, and his writings are full of meaning, beauty and interest. Of his productions, Underwood says: "Pupils who are accustomed to associate the idea of poetry with regular classic measure in rhyme, or in ten-syllabled blank verse or elastic hexameters, will commence these short and simple prose sentences with surprise, and will wonder how any number of them can form a poem. But let them read aloud with a mind in sympathy with the picture as it is displayed, and they will find by nature's unmistakable responses, that the author is a poet, and possesses the poet's uncommunicable power to touch the heart

The Two Mysteries.

In the middle of the room, in its white coffin, lay the dead child, a nephew of the poet. Near it, in a great chair, sat Walt Whitman, surrounded by little ones, and holding a beautiful little girl on his lap. The child looked curiously at the spectacle of death and then inquiringly into the old man's face. "You don't know what it is, do you, my dear?" said he. adding, "We don't, either."

E know not what it is, dear, this sleep so deep and still
The folded hands, the awful calm, the cheek so pale and

chill;

The lids that will not lift again, though we may call and call; The strange, white solitude of peace that settles over all.

We know not what it means, dear, this desolate heart-pain;
This dread to take our daily way, and walk in it again;
We know not to what other sphere the loved who leave us go
Nor why we're left to wonder still; nor why we do not know.

But this we know: Our loved and dead, if they should come this day

Should come and ask us, "What is life?" not one of us could

say.

Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be;

Yet oh, how sweet it is to us, this life we live and see!

Then might they say-these vanished ones-and blessed is the

thought!

"So death is sweet to us, beloved! though we may tell ye naught; We may not tell it to the quick-this mystery of deathYe may not tell us, if ye would, the mystery of breath."

The child who enters life comes not with knowledge or intent
So those who enter death must go as little children sent.
Nothing is known. But I believe that God is overhead.
And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead.