Born on Long Island, he entered a printer's office when he was thirteen. By the time he was twenty, he was editing his own paper, but he soon gave it up for work on a New York newspaper. When he was thirty, he traveled through the west; in "Pioneers" we have a part of the result. During the Civil War he gave himself up to nursing as long as his strength lasted. From 1873 to the time of his death he was a great invalid and poor, but every trial was nobly borne. The selections from Walt Whitman are included by special permission of Mitchell Kennerley, the publisher of the complete authorized editions of Walt Whitman's Works. PIONEERS! O PIONEERS 18. debouch: go out into. O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! Written to express the grief of the nation over the death of Abraham Lincoln at the time when the joy over the saving of the union was most intense. End of Project Gutenberg's Selections From American Poetry, by Various