Of the five years before the "Leaves of Grass" appeared too little is known. At thirty-one he was a natural Bohemian, independent enough not even to do the conventional Bohemian things like drinking and smoking, but he had shown no marked promise of achieving anything more than his own personal freedom. His writing and public speaking had been commonplace, and his journalistic work respectably successful. Then in 1855 came the evidence of an immensely expansive development, a development so great and so unusual that it met the fate of its kind, receiving from all but a very few neglect, derision, or contempt. John Burroughs tells of the staff of a leading daily paper in New York, assembled on Saturday afternoon to be paid off, greeting the passages that were read aloud to them with "peals upon peals of ironical laughter." Whitman's family were indifferent. His brother George said he "didn't read it at all--didn't think it worth reading--fingered it a little. Mother thought as I did ... Mother said that if 'Hiawatha' was poetry, perhaps Walt's was." Obscure young men like Thoreau and Burroughs were moved to early admiration, but their opinion counted for nothing with the multitude. Emerson was the single man of influence to "greet [Whitman] at the beginning of a great career." The larger public paid no attention to him; the smaller, artistic public did what they always do to a defiantly independent artist. Whitman determined his own reception when he wrote, Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived, To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe, For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them. In 1856, in a new form and with added material but under the same title, there came a second edition that received more attention and correspondingly more abuse. His frank and often wanton treatment of sex gave pause to almost every reader, qualifying the approval of his strongest champions. Emerson wrote to Carlyle: "One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American--which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again I shall." In the meanwhile the ultra-respectable--of the Jaffrey Pyncheon type--were eager to hound Whitman and his publishers out of society. Undoubtedly the advertising given by his enemies contributed no little to the circulation of the third and again enlarged edition of 1860. Of this between four and five thousand copies were sold in due time.