Walt Whitman's baseball quote (surely not 1846!)

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BASEBALL'S GREATEST QUOTATIONS
by Paul Dickson
1991

Pg. 468:
WHITMAN, WALT
 "I see great things in baseball.  It's our game--the American game.  It will
take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger
physical stoicism.  Tend to relieve us from being a nervous. dyspeptic set.  Repair
these losses, and be a blessing to us."
--Unearthed by Douglass Wallop, the quote appears in his _Baseball: An
Informal History_

"In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of
Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing 'base,' a certain
game of ball."
--_Brooklyn Eagle_, July 1846
(Walt Whitman didn't write EVERYTHING in the newspaper--ed.)


(No date at all given for the first one, but I'd say the July 23, 1846
_Brooklyn Eagle_ has got to be wrong--ed.)