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A Mote and a Beam

About This Item

  • Title: A Mote and a Beam
  • Date: 22 July 1857
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00797
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 22 July 1857: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Christian Brauns Thara Michaelis Kaylen Michaelis Stephanie Blalock Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "A Mote and a Beam." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00797.xml (TEI)
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A MOTE AND A BEAM—

Our Board of Health appear to be gifted with very peculiar faculties. They can behold death and destruction, contagion and cholera, and a thousand other evils, threatened to the city from the existence of a sunken lot away at Bushwick or somewhere else beyond the line of population; but a great, reeking, stinking canal, extending right up into the centre of the city, escapes their observation. The Wallabout Creek—the receptacle of all the sewage, distillery swill, and other abominations, of the central part of the city, emits a stench more powerful and more deadly than the concentrated odor of all the stagnant water in all the sunken lots to be found between Gowanus and Newtown Creek. Yet the Board order the lots to be filled up, while they are content to leave the inhabitants to stop their noses as they pass the creek. You may ride by all the manufacturing establishments from Hunter's Point to the Wallabout, and nowhere will your senses be offended with such an obnoxious odor as is emitted from the creek or canal near the corner of Hewes street and Kent avenue. The smell is not unlike that of sulphurretted hydrogen, and its chemical influence on the atmosphere is strong enough to tarnish all the metal door knobs in the vicinity! One of the members of the Board of Health professes to be especially desirous of having the 19th ward free from infection, (and many substantial reasons he doubtless has for his course in this respect) but we assure him that the value of real estate in that ward is depreciated incomparably more by the existence of the Wallabout Creek in its present state of reeking nuisance, than it would be by having a bone boiling establishment located on every block.

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