Such was the old Whitman home and country, to which the boy's earliest memories belonged, where he spent some of the years and nearly all the holidays of his youth and early manhood, and in which his later thoughts found their natural background, his deepest consciousness its native soil. It is, as we have seen, no tame or narrow country, but wide and generous, and it is within sound of the sea. In the still night that succeeds a storm, you may hear the strange low murmur of the Atlantic surf beating upon the coast.[28] The boy was born in the hills, with that sea-murmur about him. FOOTNOTES: [4] See _inter alia_ Furman's _Antiquities of Long Island_; and his _Notes Relating to the Town of Brooklyn_; Silas Wood's _Sketch of First Settlement of L. I._; B. F. Thompson's _History of L. I._; N. S. Prime's _History of L. I._; _A Brief Description of New York_, by Daniel Denton (1690), ed. by G. Furman. [5] Wood, 73 n. [6] See Wood's, Thomson's, and Prime's _History of L. I._ [7] _Comp. Prose_, 7; _cf._ Furman's _Antiquities_, 249; Denton, 14. [8] Wood, 65; _cf._ _Comp. Prose_. [9] _In re_, 197. [10] See Appendix A. [11] S. M. Janney's _History of Friends_, vol. i. [12] Furman's _Antiq._, 97; Janney, vol. ii. [13] Furman's _Antiq._, 229. [14] Thompson, _op. cit._ [15] Symonds, xii.; _Savage Genealog. Dict._ [16] _Comp. Prose_, 3; Bucke, 13. [17] Camden Introd. [18] _Ibid._ [19] _Comp. Prose_, 6; Camden, xix. [20] _In re_, 202. [21] Burroughs, 79; Bucke, 15; _Whit. Fellowship_, '94 (Brinton and Traubel); _Wound Dresser_, 115, etc. [22] Bucke, 16; _Comp. Prose_, 274; Camden, xvii.; _In re_, 195, etc. [23] See Appendix A. [24] Wood, 5 (ed. by A. J. Spooner). [25] 1828. [26] _Whit. Fellowship_, _op. cit._ [27] _Comp. Prose_, 4. [28] _Ibid._, 6. CHAPTER II BOYHOOD IN BROOKLYN The hill-range which forms the back-bone of Long Island, and upon whose slopes Walt Whitman was born, terminates on the west in Brooklyn Heights, which overlook the busy bay and crowded city of New York. The heights recall Washington's masterly retreat; and the hint is enough to remind the shame-faced English visitor that the American is not without cause for a certain coolness in the very genuine affection which he manifests for the mother country. 'Seventy-six and the six years that followed, with all their legacy of bitter thoughts, was succeeded by 1814 and the burning of the Capitol. In this later war it was Virginia, not New England, that took the initiative; Massachusetts and Connecticut even opposed it, and it may have been none too popular in adjacent Long Island. It is doubtful whether Major van Velsor or his sons actually took the field against the British. But this second and last of the Anglo-American wars was still a bitter and vivid memory when in May, 1823,[29] towards Walt's fourth birthday, his father, the old major's son-in-law, left the farm, removing with his family to Front Street, Brooklyn, near the wharves and water-side.