..., could hardly have been, or wished to be, a flower; it was not in his ancestry, his education, or his environment. Blending in his own nature the courage, the determination, and the uncompromising Puritan idealism of good, if somewhat decadent, English ancestry with the placid slowness, selfesteem, stubbornness, and mysticism of better Dutch (and Quaker) ancestry, Walt Whitman was born 31 May, 1819,...