I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken--the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords.[86] The earlier Whitman is a man _par excellence_ of the city as Muir is of the mountains and Thoreau of the woods. I A jungle of writings has sprung up about Whitman; as many as four biographies of him have appeared in a single year, yet aside from two or three careful studies, like those of Perry and Carpenter, no really scholarly or unbiased work has been issued. Before the last word can be spoken of the poet there must be an adequate text with variorum readings and chronological arrangement. The present definitive edition is a chaos, almost useless for purposes of study. New and old are mixed indiscriminatingly. The "Chants Democratic," for instance, of the earlier editions have been dismembered and scattered from end to end of the book. All of the older poems were in constant state of revision from edition to edition, until now patches from every period of the poet's life may be found on many of them. Large sections of the earlier editions were omitted, enough indeed at one time and another to make up a volume. The fact is important, since the material rejected by a poet at different stages in his evolution often tells much concerning his art. There is, moreover, a strange dearth of biographical material at critical points in Whitman's life, notably during that formative period preceding the first issue of _Leaves of Grass_. In his later years he talked of his own experiences and aims and ideals with the utmost freedom; through Traubel, his Boswell, he put himself on record with minuteness; his poetic work is all autobiographical; and almost all of his editions are prefaced by long explanations and defenses, yet of the really significant periods of his life we know little. A crude man of the people, a Broadway rough, as he described himself, who has been writing very ordinary poems and stories and editorials--how ordinary we can easily judge, for very many of them have been preserved--suddenly brings out a book of poems as unlike any earlier work of his or any previous work of his nation or language as an issue of the _Amaranth_ or the _Gem_ would be unlike the book of _Amos_. What brought about this remarkable climax? Was it the result of an evolution within the poet's soul, an evolution extending over a period of years? Did it come as a sudden inspiration or as a deliberate consummation after a study of models? We do not know. There are no contemporary letters, no transition poems, no testimony of any friend to whom the poet laid bare his soul. At one period we have verses like these: