In the observation of the drama of human nature--if, indeed, “all the world’s a stage”--Walt Whitman had rare advantages as auditor, from the beginning. Several of his earlier years, embracing the age of fifteen to twenty-one, were spent in teaching country schools in Queens and Suffolk counties, New York, following the quaint old fashion of “boarding round,” that is, moving from house to house and farm to farm, among high and low, living a few days alternately at each, until the quarter was up, and then commencing over again. His occupation, for a long period, as printer, with frequent traveling, is to be remembered; also as carpenter. Quite a good deal of his life was passed in boarding-houses and hotels. The three years in the Secession War of course play a marked part. He never made any long sea-voyages, but for years at one period (1846-60) went out in their boats, sometimes for a week at a time, with the New York Bay pilots, among whom he was a great favorite. In 1848-9 his location was in New Orleans, with occasional sojourns in the other Gulf States besides Louisiana. From 1865 to ’73 he lived in Washington. Born in 1819, his life through childhood and as a young and middle-aged man--that is, up to 1862--was mainly spent, with a few intervals of Western and Southern jaunts, on his native Long Island, mostly in Brooklyn. At that date, aged forty-two, he went down to the field of war in Virginia, and for the three subsequent years he was actively engaged as volunteer attendant and nurse on the battle-fields, to the Southern soldiers equally with the Northern, and among the wounded in the army hospitals. He was prostrated by hospital malaria and “inflammation of the veins” in 1864, but recovered. He worked “on his own hook,” had indomitable strength, health, and activity, was on the move night and day, not only till the official close of the Secession struggle, but for a long time afterward, for there was a vast legacy of suffering soldiers left when the contest was over. He was permanently appointed under President Lincoln, in 1865, to a respectable office in the Attorney-General’s department. (This followed his removal from a temporary clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department. Secretary Harlan dismissed him from that post specifically for being the author of “Leaves of Grass.”) He worked on for some time in the Attorney-General’s office, and was promoted, but the seeds of the hospital malaria seem never to have been fully eradicated. He was at last struck down, quite suddenly, by a severe paralytic shock (left hemiplegia), from which--after some weeks--he was slowly recovering, when he lost by death his mother and a sister. Soon followed two additional shocks of paralysis, though slighter than the first. Summer had now commenced at Washington, and his doctor imperatively ordered the sick man an entire change of scene--the mountains or the sea-shore. Whitman accordingly left Washington,