Lived awhile in New
Orleans, and work'd there on the editorial staff of "daily Crescent"
newspaper. After a time plodded back northward, up the Mississippi,
and around to, and by way of the great lakes, Michigan, Huron, and
Erie, to Niagara falls and lower Canada, finally returning through
central New York and down the Hudson; traveling altogether
probably 8,000 miles this trip, to and fro. '51, '53, occupied in
house-building in Brooklyn. (For a little of the first part of that
time in printing a daily and weekly paper, "the Freeman.") '55, lost
my dear father this year by death. Commenced putting "Leaves of Grass"
to press for good, at the job printing office of my friends, the
brothers Rome, in Brooklyn, after many MS. doings and undoings--(I had
great trouble in leaving out the stock "poetical" touches, but
succeeded at last.) I am now (1856-'7) passing through my 37th year.
SOURCES OF CHARACTER--RESULTS--1860
To sum up the foregoing from the outset (and, of course, far, far more
unrecorded,) I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps to
my own character, now solidified for good or bad, and its subsequent
literary and other outgrowth--the maternal nativity-stock brought
hither from far-away Netherlands, for one, (doubtless the best)--the
subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy,
wilfulness) which I get from my paternal English elements, for
another--and the combination of my Long Island birth-spot, sea-shores,
childhood's scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and New York
--with, I suppose, my experiences afterward in the secession outbreak,
for the third.
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