Whitman and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental movement, pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them voices in the wilderness crying to deaf or angry ears, both of them unheeded until a new generation had arisen to whom they had become but names and books. Thoreau was born in 1817; Whitman in 1819, the year of Lowell, Story, Parsons, Herman Melville, J. G. Holland, Julia Ward Howe, and E. P. Whipple, and of the Victorians, Kingsley, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Whitman published _Leaves of Grass_, his first significant volume, in 1855, the year of _Hiawatha_, of _Maud_, and of Arnold's _Poems_. He issued it again in 1856 and again in 1860--a strange nondescript book rendered all the more strange by the fact, thoroughly advertised in the second edition, that it had won from Emerson the words: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.... I greet you at the beginning of a great career." But even the compelling name of Emerson could not sell the book; little notice, in fact, was taken of it save as a few voices expressed horror and anger; and when in 1862 Whitman became lost in the confusion of the war, he had made not so much impression upon America as had Thoreau at the time of his death that same year. Until well into the seventies Walt Whitman seemed only a curious phenomenon in an age grown accustomed to curious phenomena. The antecedents and the early training of Whitman were far from literary. He came from a race of Long Island farmers who had adhered to one spot for generations. No American was ever more completely a product of our own soil. My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here, From parents the same, and their parents' parents the same. They were crude, vigorous plowmen, unbookish and elemental. The father was the first to break from the soil and the ancestral environment, but he left it only to become a laborer on buildings in the neighboring city of Brooklyn.