An early review of Leaves of Grass, the review itself perhaps written by Whitman, “spoke of the Whitman who appeared in Gabriel Harrison’s 1854 daguerreotype, as rendered in a steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer—‘in a garb, half sailor’s/half workingman’s, with no superfluous appendage of coat or waistcoat, a ‘wideawake’ perched jauntily on his head, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip, with a certain air of mild defiance, and an expression of pensive insolence in his face which seems to betoken a consciousness of his mission as the ‘coming man.’”

 

          Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 187-88, quoting New York Dissected 240 n. 28; see also In Re 13-21.