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

[George Thompson]

Barry writes:

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

> 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.)
>
A search of the Brooklyn Eagle database for "perambulations" turns up the second passage from July 23, 1846, p. 2.

I'm quite sure that the first quotation is from late in Whitman's life, probably from his conversations with Horace Traubel at his home in Camden, N. J.  I will try to check further.  The Eagle shows hundreds of occurences of "dyspeptic" from the 1840s, but only three of "stoicism", none this.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.