Continuing the subject, my friends have more than once suggested⁠—or may be the garrulity of advancing age is possessing me⁠—some further embryonic facts of Leaves of Grass , and especially how I enter’d upon them. Dr. Bucke has, in his volume, already fully and fairly described the preparation of my poetic field, with the particular and general plowing, planting, seeding, and occupation of the ground, till everything was fertilized, rooted, and ready to start its own way for good or bad. Not till after all this, did I attempt any serious acquaintance with poetic literature. Along in my sixteenth year I had become possessor of a stout, well-cramm’d one thousand page octavo volume (I have it yet,) containing Walter Scott’s poetry entire⁠—an inexhaustible mine and treasury of poetic forage (especially the endless forests and jungles of notes)⁠—has been so to me for fifty years, and remains so to this day. 9