On Democracy, by Walt Whitman, introduction by David Bromwich, Library of America, 210 pages, $12.50
When Walt Whitman was born in 1819, traversing Long Island took days and was probably best done on foot. Brooklyn, still independent of New York City, was a farm-country alcove for Quakers, freethinkers, and country writers and educators. Whitman became a teacher while still a teenager (and included a student of color in his classes, a rare thing for teachers to accept at the time). His home was the sort of scene you might see on a gigantic puzzle today: old wooden fences, dirt roads, a few lonely wisps of chimney smoke out in the hilly distance.
