PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

America does not repel the past, or what it has produced under its forms,

or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or the old religions;

accepts the lesson with calmness; is not so impatient as has been supposed

that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while

the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the

new forms; perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and

sleeping rooms of the house; perceives that it waits a little while in the

door, that it was fittest for its days, that its action has descended to

the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches, and that he shall be

fittest for his days.

The Americans, of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the

fullest poetical Nature. The United States themselves are essentially the

greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most

stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here

at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the

broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation, but a

teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings, necessarily

blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in vast masses.

Here is the hospitality which for ever indicates heroes. Here are the

roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul

loves. Here the performance, disdaining the trivial, unapproached in the

tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings and the push of its

perspective, spreads with crampless and flowing breadth, and showers its

prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the riches

of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from

the ground, or the orchards drop apples, or the bays contain fish, or men

beget children.

Other states indicate themselves in their deputies: but the genius of the

United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in

its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlours, nor even

in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people. Their

manners, speech, dress, friendships,--the freshness and candour of their

physiognomy--the picturesque looseness of their carriage--their deathless

attachment to freedom--their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or

mean--the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the

citizens of all other states--the fierceness of their roused resentment--

their curiosity and welcome of novelty--their self-esteem and wonderful

sympathy--their susceptibility to a slight--the air they have of persons

who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors--the

fluency of their speech--their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly

tenderness and native elegance of soul--their good temper and open-

handedness--the terrible significance of their elections, the President's

taking off his hat to them, not they to him--these too are unrhymed poetry.

It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a

corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen. Not

nature, nor swarming states, nor streets and steamships, nor prosperous

business, nor farms nor capital nor learning, may suffice for the ideal of

man, nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either. A live

nation can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best authority the

cheapest--namely, from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable uses

of individuals or states, and of present action and grandeur, and of the

subjects of poets.--As if it were necessary to trot back generation after

generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the

demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make

their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by

discovery, and what has transpired since in North and South America, were

less than the small theatre of the antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of

the Middle Ages! The pride of the United States leaves the wealth and

finesse of the cities, and all returns of commerce and agriculture, and all

the magnitude or geography or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the breed

of full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and simple.

The American poets are to enclose old and new; for America is the race of

races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other

continents arrive as contributions: he gives them reception for their sake

and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit: he

incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi

with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio

and Saint Lawrence with the Falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not

embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him.

The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland, and the sea

off Massachusetts and Maine, and over Manhattan Bay, and over Champlain and

Erie, and over Ontario and Huron and Michigan and Superior, and over the

Texan and Mexican and Floridian and Cuban seas, and over the seas off

California and Oregon, is not tallied by the blue breadth of the waters

below more than the breadth of above and below is tallied by him. When the

long Atlantic coast stretches longer, and the Pacific coast stretches

longer, he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them

also from east to west, and reflects what is between them. On him rise

solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and

live-oak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and lime-tree and

cottonwood and tulip-tree and cactus and wild-vine and tamarind and

persimmon, and tangles as tangled as any cane-brake or swamp, and forests

coated with transparent ice and icicles, hanging from the boughs and

crackling in the wind, and sides and peaks of mountains, and pasturage

sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie,--with flights and songs

and screams that answer those of the wild-pigeon and high-hold and orchard-

oriole and coot and surf-duck and red-shouldered-bawk and fish-hawk and

white-ibis and Indian-hen and cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and

pied-sheldrake and blackbird and mocking-bird and buzzard and condor and

night-heron and eagle. To him the hereditary countenance descends, both

mother's and father's. To him enter the essences of the real things and

past and present events--of the enormous diversity of temperature and

agriculture and mines--the tribes of red aborigines--the weather-beaten

vessels entering new ports, or making landings on rocky coasts--the first

settlements north or south--the rapid stature and muscle--the haughty

defiance of '76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution--

the union always surrounded by blatherers, and always calm and

impregnable--the perpetual coming of immigrants--the wharf-hemmed cities

and superior marine--the unsurveyed interior--the loghouses and clearings

and wild animals and hunters and trappers--the free commerce--the fisheries

and whaling and gold-digging--the endless gestations of new states--the

convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all

climates and the uttermost parts--the noble character of the young

mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen--the general

ardour and friendliness and enterprise--the perfect equality of the female

with the male--the large amativeness--the fluid movement of the

population--the factories and mercantile life and labour-saving machinery--

the Yankee swap--the New York firemen and the target excursion--the

Southern plantation life--the character of the north-east and of the north-

west and south-west-slavery, and the tremulous spreading of hands to

protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it

ceases, or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease. For such

the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to

be indirect, and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes

through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be

chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and that finish the

verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative,

and has vista. Here comes one among the well-beloved stone-cutters, and

plans with decision and science, and sees the solid and beautiful forms of

the future where there are now no solid forms.

Of all nations, the United States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most

needs poets, and will doubtless have the greatest, and use them the

greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as

their poets shall. Of all mankind, the great poet is the equable man. Not

in him, but off from him, things are grotesque or eccentric, or fail of

their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good, and nothing in its place is

bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions, neither

more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse, and he is the key. He is

the equaliser of his age and land: he supplies what wants supplying, and

checks what wants checking. If peace is the routine, out of him speaks the

spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities,

encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce--lighting the study of

man, the soul, immortality--federal, state or municipal government,

marriage, health, free-trade, intertravel by land and sea--nothing too

close, nothing too far off,--the stars not too far off. In war, he is the

most deadly force of the war. Who recruits him recruits horse and foot: he

fetches parks of artillery, the best that engineer ever knew. If the time

becomes slothful and heavy, he knows how to arouse it: he can make every

word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or

obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master

him, he masters it. High up out of reach, he stands turning a concentrated

light; he turns the pivot with his finger; he baffles the swiftest runners

as he stands, and easily overtakes and envelops them. The time straying

toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by his steady

faith; he spreads out his dishes; he offers the sweet firm-fibred meat that

grows men and women. His brain is the ultimate brain. He is no arguer, he

is judgment. He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling

around a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith.

His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. In the talk on the soul

and eternity and God, off of his equal plane, he is silent. He sees

eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement: he sees eternity

in men and women,--he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. Faith

is the antiseptic of the soul,--it pervades the common people and preserves

them: they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There is

that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person

that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet

sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and

perfect as the greatest artist. The power to destroy or remould is freely

used by him, but never the power of attack. What is past is past. If he

does not expose superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes,

he is not what is wanted. The presence of the greatest poet conquers; not

parleying or struggling or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed that

way, see after him! there is not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy

or cunning or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or colour, or

delusion of hell or the necessity of hell; and no man thenceforward shall

be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin.

The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into

anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and

life of the universe. He is a seer--he is individual--he is complete in

himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not. He

is not one of the chorus--he does not stop for any regulation--he is the

President of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the

rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses

corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own, and

foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks

all the investigations of man, and all the instruments and books of the

earth, and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is

impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space

of a peachpit, and given audience to far and near and to the sunset, and

had all things enter with electric swiftness, softly and duly, without

confusion or jostling or jam.

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the

orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes: but folks

expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which

always attach to dumb real objects,--they expect him to indicate the path

between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well

enough--probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters,

woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the

love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of

horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign

of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic, in

outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive: some may,

but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or

uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints

or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the

soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more

luxuriant rhyme; and of uniformity, that it conveys itself into its own

roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems

show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and

loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the

shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume

impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music

or orations or recitations are not independent, but dependent. All beauty

comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in

conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough--the fact will prevail through

the universe: but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail.

Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what

you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give

alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your

income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have

patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing

known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful

uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,

read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,

re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,

dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a

great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the

silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and

in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time

in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed

and manured: others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to

the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches,

and shall master all attachment.

The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.

He consumes an eternal passion, and is indifferent which chance happens,

and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune, and persuades

daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks others is fuel for

his burning progress to contact and amorous joy. Other proportions of the

reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his proportions. All expected

from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the sight of the

daybreak, or a scene of the winter woods, or the presence of children

playing, or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman. His love, above

all love, has leisure and expanse--he leaves room ahead of himself. He is

no irresolute or suspicious lover--he is sure--he scorns intervals. His

experience and the showers and thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar

him: suffering and darkness cannot--death and fear cannot. To him complaint

and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth--he saw

them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore, or the shore of the sea,

than he is of the fruition of his love, and of all perfection and beauty.

The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss--it is inevitable as

life--it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds

another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from

the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of

things with man. To these respond perfections, not only in the committees

that were supposed to stand for the rest, but in the rest themselves just

the same. These understand the law of perfection in masses and floods--that

its finish is to each for itself and onward from itself--that it is profuse

and impartial--that there is not a minute of the light or dark, nor an acre

of the earth or sea, without it--nor any direction of the sky, nor any

trade or employment, nor any turn of events. This is the reason that about

the proper expression of beauty there is precision and balance,--one part

does not need to be thrust above another. The best singer is not the one

who has the most lithe and powerful organ: the pleasure of poems is not in

them that take the handsomest measure and similes and sound.

Without effort, and without exposing in the least how it is done, the

greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and

scenes and persons, some more and some less, to bear on your individual

character, as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws

that pursue and follow time. What is the purpose must surely be there, and

the clue of it must be there; and the faintest indication is the indication

of the best, and then becomes the clearest indication. Past and present and

future are not disjoined, but joined. The greatest poet forms the

consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead

out of their coffins, and stands them again on their feet: he says to the

past, Rise and walk before me that I may realise you. He learns the

lesson--he places himself where the future becomes present. The greatest

poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and

passions,--he finally ascends and finishes all: he exhibits the pinnacles

that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond--he glows a moment

on the extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile

or frown: by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall

be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does

not moralise or make applications of morals,--he knows the soul. The soul

has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any

lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride, and

the one balances the other, and neither can stretch too far while it

stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with

the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both, and they are

vital in his style and thoughts.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of

letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity,--nothing can

make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave

of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects their

articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in

literature with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of

animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods

and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art. If you, have

looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the masters of

the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight

of the grey-gull over the bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood-horse,

or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the

sun journeying through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward,

with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The greatest

poet has less a marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and

things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself.

He swears to his art,--I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my

writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me

and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the

richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may

exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe, I will have purposes as health or

heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or

pourtray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition.

You shall stand by my side, and look in the mirror with me.

The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by

their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of

that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the traits of

the brotherhood of writers, savans, musicians, inventors, and artists,

nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms. In the

need of poems, philosophy, politics, mechanism, science, behaviour, the

craft of art, an appropriate native grand opera, shipcraft or any craft, he

is greatest for ever and for ever who contributes the greatest original

practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere

worthy of itself, and makes one.

The messages of great poets to each man and woman are,--Come to us on equal

terms, only then can you understand us. We are no better than you; what we

enclose you enclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there

could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and

that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight

countervails another--and that men can be good or grand only of the

consciousness of their supremacy within them. What do you think is the

grandeur of storms and dismemberments, and the deadliest battles and

wrecks, and the wildest fury of the elements, and the power of the sea, and

the motion of nature, and of the throes of human desires, and dignity and

hate and love? It is that something in the soul which says,--Rage on, whirl

on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and

of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of

all terror and all pain.

The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for

encouraging competitors: they shall be kosmos--without monopoly or

secrecy--glad to pass anything to any one--hungry for equals night and day.

They shall not be careful of riches and privilege,--they shall be riches

and privilege: they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The most

affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out

of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard shall delineate no

class of persons, nor one or two out of the strata of interests, nor love

most nor truth most, nor the soul most nor the body most; and not be for

the eastern states more than the western, or the northern states more than

the southern.

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest

poet, but always his encouragement and support. The outset and remembrance

are there--there the arms that lifted him first and brace him best--there

he returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor and traveller, the

anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist,

mathematician, historian, and lexicographer, are not poets; but they are

the lawgivers of poets, and their construction underlies the structure of

every perfect poem. No matter what rises or is uttered, they send the seed

of the conception of it: of them and by them stand the visible proofs of

souls. If there shall be love and content between the father and the son,

and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the

father, there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable

science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation of

the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the

soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are

fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed--

they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and

supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it, departs

as a dream. What has ever happened, what happens, and whatever may or shall

happen, the vital laws enclose all: they are sufficient for any case and

for all cases--none to be hurried or retarded--any miracle of affairs or

persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme where every motion, and every

spear of grass, and the frames and spirits of men and women, and all that

concerns them, are unspeakably perfect miracles, all referring to all, and

each distinct and in its place. It is also not consistent with the reality

of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more

divine than men and women.

Men and women, and the earth and all upon it, are simply to be taken as

they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall

be unintermitted, and shall be done with perfect candour. Upon this basis

philosophy speculates, ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the

eternal tendencies of all toward happiness, never inconsistent with what is

clear to the senses and to the soul. For the eternal tendencies of all

toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. Whatever

comprehends less than that--whatever is less than the laws of light and of

astronomical motion--or less than the laws that follow the thief, the liar,

the glutton, and the drunkard, through this life, and doubtless afterward--

or less than vast stretches of time, or the slow formation of density, or

the patient upheaving of strata--is of no account. Whatever would put God

in a poem or system of philosophy as contending against some being or

influence is also of no account. Sanity and ensemble characterise the great

master:--spoilt in one principle, all is spoilt. The great master has

nothing to do with miracles. He sees health for himself in being one of the

mass--he sees the hiatus in singular eminence. To the perfect shape comes

common ground. To be under the general law is great, for that is to

correspond with it. The master knows that he is unspeakably great, and that

all are unspeakably great--that nothing, for instance, is greater than to

conceive children, and bring them up well--that to be is just as great as

to perceive or tell.

In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is

indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women

exist; but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than

from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages

are worthy the grand idea,--to them it is confided, and they must sustain

it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it. The

attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn

of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are

full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them a while,

and, though they neither speak nor advise, you shall learn the faithful

American lesson. Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is

quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from

the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp

show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or

any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises

nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no

discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent

advance and retreat--the enemy triumphs--the prison, the handcuffs, the

iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote, and lead-balls, do their

work--the cause is asleep--the strong throats are choked with their own

blood--the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass

each other ... and is liberty gone out of that place? No, never. When

liberty goes, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go: it

waits for all the rest to go--it is the last. When the memories of the old

martyrs are faded utterly away--when the large names of patriots are

laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators--when the boys

are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and

traitors instead--when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and

laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people--

when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung with compassion at the

sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no

man master--and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves--

when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its

experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a

helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel

inferiority--when those in all parts of these states who could easier

realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]--when the swarms of

cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly

involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures

or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love

and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no--

when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary

than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his

head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart--and when servility by

town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale

or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly

after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape--or rather

when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any

part of the earth--then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged

from that part of the earth.

[Footnote 1: This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here

reproduced _verbatim_ from the American edition.]

As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and

soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of

genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts

are showered over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile

light--also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many-

fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a

beauty: the multiplication-table its--old age its--the carpenter's trade

its--the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at

sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty--the American

circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the

commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the

kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and

stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from

its need, and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say,

shall not realise or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the

library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for

it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same

through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom

they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity and

maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American

states, strong and healthy and accomplished, shall receive no pleasure from

violations of natural models, and must not permit them. In paintings or

mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood, or in the illustrations of books

or newspapers, or in any comic or tragic prints, or in the patterns of

woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or to

put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to

put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts

honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or

contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially, it

is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work,

nothing _outré_ can be allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed that

conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the

nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to

the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without ornament.

Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous

children are conceived only in those communities where the models of

natural forms are public every day. Great genius and the people of these

states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are

properly told, there is no more need of romances.

The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and

by the justification of perfect personal candour. Then folks echo a new

cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains. How beautiful is

candour! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candour.

Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the

inner and outer world, and that there is no single exception, and that

never since our earth gathered itself in a mass has deceit or subterfuge or

prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a

shade--and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the

whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and

despised--and that the soul has never been once fooled and never can be

fooled--and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid

puff--and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor

upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any

part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid

wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes,

nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that

follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action

afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation

anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.

Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and

comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and

destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of

nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs--

these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of

the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has

been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself

to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a

lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these

economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher

notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight

attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life

are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond

the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few

clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned,

and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the

melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to

the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days

and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or

infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and

all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and

atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you

pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness

and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naïveté,

and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the

great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface

and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears

the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the

reached kisses of the soul. Still the right explanation remains to be made

about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the

most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when

little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence

suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year

or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back

at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the

clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction

running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself--all else has

reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of

consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in

a day or a month, or any part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death,

but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect

lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The

spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one

name of word or deed--not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers--

not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder--no serpentine poison of

those that seduce women--not the foolish yielding of women--not of the

attainment of gain by discreditable means--not any nastiness of appetite--

not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to

sons, or sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their

boys--not of greedy looks or malignant wishes--nor any of the wiles

practised by people upon themselves--ever is or ever can be stamped on the

programme, but it is duly realised and returned, and that returned in

further performances, and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity

or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason,

whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary--to

add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned,

white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration

down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or

female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure

profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through

the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is

well--if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same--if the

President or chief justice is wise, it is the same--if the young mechanic

or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. The interest will come round--all

will come round. All the best actions of war and peace--all help given to

relatives and strangers, and the poor and old and sorrowful, and young

children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons--all

furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves--all the self-denial

that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take the seats of the

boats--all offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a

friend's sake or opinion's sake--all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by

their neighbours--all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of

mothers--all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded--all the

grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we

inherit--and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient

nations unknown to us by name or date or location--all that was ever

manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no--all that has at any time been

well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his

mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands--and all that is well thought

or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the

wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here--or that is

henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any

one--these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inured now, and will

inure always, to the identities from which they sprung or shall spring. Did

you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist--

no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist--no result exists now without

being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so

backward without the farthest mentionable spot coining a bit nearer the

beginning than any other spot.... Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The

prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the

soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its

ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has

no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead

or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present,

matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible

forgiveness or deputed atonement--knows that the young man who composedly

perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while

the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches

and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning--and

that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to

prefer long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives

the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does

leaping onward and waiting to meet him again--and who in his spirit in any

emergency whatever neither hurries nor avoids death.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he

does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides--

and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang

on its neck with incomparable love--and if he be not himself the age

transfigured--and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives

similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and

inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its

inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day,

and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the

passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the

representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful

children of the wave--let him merge in the general run and wait his

development.... Still, the final test of poems or any character or work

remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges

performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through

them? Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction

of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in

science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and

behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have

the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing

detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he beloved

long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him?

and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old

think of him?

A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and

complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a

man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or

woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last

under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realise

and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring--

he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of

him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live

regions previously unattained. Thenceforward is no rest: they see the space

and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums.

The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns

one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and

chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall

launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself,

and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through

the ceaseless rings, and shall never be quiet again.

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a

while--perhaps a generation or two,--dropping off by degrees. A superior

breed shall take their place--the gangs of kosmos and prophets _en masse_

shall take their place. A new order shall arise; and they shall be the

priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built

under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the

divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be

interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find

their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future.

They shall not deign to defend immortality, or God, or the perfection of

things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They

shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the

earth.

The English language befriends the grand American expression--it is brawny

enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who,

through all change of circumstance, was never without the idea of political

liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of

daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful

language of resistance--it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech

of the proud and melancholy races, and of all who aspire. It is the chosen

tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality,

friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage. It is the medium

that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.

No great literature, nor any like style of behaviour or oratory or social

intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions, or the

treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail, or detail of

the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation, or courts or police, or

tuition or architecture, or songs or amusements, or the costumes of young

men, can long elude the jealous and passionate instinct of American

standards. Whether or no the sign appears from the mouths of the people, it

throbs a live interrogation in every freeman's and freewoman's heart after

that which passes by, or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my

country? Are its disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the

ever-growing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well united, proud

beyond the old models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown

fresh out of the fields, or drawn from the sea, for use to me, to-day,

here? I know that what answers for me, an American, must answer for any

individual or nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this

answer? or is it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the

needs of the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of

pleasure overlaid by modern science and forms? Does this acknowledge

liberty with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at

nought, for life and death? Will it help breed one good-shaped man, and a

woman to be his perfect and independent mate? Does it improve manners? Is

it for the nursing of the young of the republic? Does it solve readily with

the sweet milk of the breasts of the mother of many children? Has it too

the old, ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality? Does it look with the

same love on the last-born and on those hardening toward stature, and on

the errant, and on those who disdain all strength of assault outside of

their own?

The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away. The coward

will surely pass away. The expectation of the vital and great can only be

satisfied by the demeanour of the vital and great. The swarms of the

polished, deprecating, and reflectors, and the polite, float off and leave

no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the

visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their

warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor,

the statesman, the erudite--they are not unappreciated--they fall in their

place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No

disguise can pass on it--no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none,

it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself

will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he

has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and

wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its

poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is

true, the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs

him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

[Script: Meantime, dear friend,

Farewell, Walt Whitman.]

_CHANTS DEMOCRATIC._

_STARTING FROM PAUMANOK._

1.

Starting from fish-shape Paumanok,[1] where I was born,

Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect mother;

After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;

Dweller in Mannahatta,[2] city of ships, my city,--or on southern savannas;

Or a soldier camped, or carrying my knapsack and gun--or a miner in

California;

Or rude in my home in Dakotah's woods, my diet meat, my drink from the

spring;

Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,

Far from the clank of crowds, intervals passing, rapt and happy;

Aware of the fresh free giver, the flowing Missouri--aware of mighty

Niagara

Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains--the hirsute and strong-

breasted bull;

Of earths, rocks, fifth-month flowers, experienced--stars, rain, snow, my

amaze;

Having studied the mocking-bird's tones, and the mountain hawk's,

And heard at dusk the unrivalled one, the hermit thrush, from the

swamp-cedars,

Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

2.

Victory, union, faith, identity, time,

Yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches,

mystery,

Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.

This, then, is life;

Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

How curious! how real!

Under foot the divine soil--over head the sun.

See, revolving, the globe;

The ancestor-continents, away, grouped together;

The present and future continents, north and south, with the isthmus

between.

See, vast trackless spaces;

As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill;

Countless masses debouch upon them;

They are now covered with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.

See, projected through time,

For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend--they never stop,

Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;

One generation playing its part, and passing on,

Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,

With faces turned sideways or backward towards me, to listen,

With eyes retrospective towards me.

3.

Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian;

Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!

For you a programme of chants.

Chants of the prairies;

Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican Sea;

Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota;

Chants going forth from the centre, from Kansas, and thence, equidistant,

Shooting in pulses of fire, ceaseless, to vivify all.

4.

In the Year 80 of the States,[3]

My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents

the same,

I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

(Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.)

I harbour, for good or bad--I permit to speak, at every hazard--

Nature now without check, with original energy.

5.

Take my leaves, America! take them South, and take them North!

Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring;

Surround them, East and West! for they would surround you;

And you precedents! connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly

with you.

I conned old times;

I sat studying at the feet of the great masters:

Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me!

In the name of these States, shall I scorn the antique?

Why, these are the children of the antique, to justify it.

6.

Dead poets, philosophs, priests,

Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,

Language-shapers on other shores,

Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,

I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted

hither:

I have perused it--own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it;)

Think nothing can ever be greater--nothing can ever deserve more than it

deserves;

Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,

I stand in my place, with my own day, here.

Here lands female and male;

Here the heirship and heiress-ship of the world--here the flame of

materials;

Here spirituality, the translatress, the openly-avowed,

The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms;

The satisfier, after due long-waiting, now advancing,

Yes, here comes my mistress, the Soul.

7.

The SOUL!

For ever and for ever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than

water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most

spiritual poems;

And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,

For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul, and of

immortality.

I will make a song for these States, that no one State may under any

circumstances be subjected to another State;

And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night

between all the States, and between any two of them;

And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with

menacing points,

And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces:

And a song make I, of the One formed out of all;

The fanged and glittering one whose head is over all;

Resolute, warlike one, including and over all;

However high the head of any else, that head is over all.

I will acknowledge contemporary lands;

I will trail the whole geography of the globe, and salute courteously every

city large and small;

And employments! I will put in my poems, that with you is heroism, upon

land and sea--And I will report all heroism from an American point

of view;

And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me--for I am determined

to tell you with courageous clear voice, to prove you illustrious.

I will sing the song of companionship;

I will show what alone must finally compact these;

I believe These are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it

in me;

I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening

to consume me;

I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires;

I will give them complete abandonment;

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love;

For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy?

And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

8.

I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races;

I advance from the people _en masse_ in their own spirit;

Here is what sings unrestricted faith.

Omnes! Omnes! let others ignore what they may;

I make the poem of evil also--I commemorate that part also;

I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is--And I say there is

in fact no evil,

Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the land, or to

me, as anything else.

I too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a Religion--I too

go to the wars;

It may be I am destined to utter the loudest cries thereof, the winner's

pealing shouts;

Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above everything.

Each is not for its own sake;

I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the sky, are for religion's

sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough;

None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough;

None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the

future is.

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their

religion;

Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;

Nor character, nor life worthy the name, without religion;

Nor land, nor man or woman, without religion.

9.

What are you doing, young man?

Are you so earnest--so given up to literature, science, art, amours?

These ostensible realities, politics, points?

Your ambition or business, whatever it may be?

It is well--Against such I say not a word--I am their poet also;

But behold! such swiftly subside--burnt up for religion's sake;

For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of

the earth,

Any more than such are to religion.

10.

What do you seek, so pensive and silent?

What do you need, Camerado?

Dear son! do you think it is love?

Listen, dear son--listen, America, daughter or son!

It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess--and yet it

satisfies--it is great;

But there is something else very great--it makes the whole coincide;

It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands, sweeps and

provides for all.

11.

Know you: to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,

The following chants, each for its kind, I sing.

My comrade!

For you, to share with me, two greatnesses--and a third one, rising

inclusive and more resplendent,

The greatness of Love and Democracy--and the greatness of Religion.

Mélange mine own! the unseen and the seen;

Mysterious ocean where the streams empty;

Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me;

Living beings, identities, now doubtless near us in the air, that we know

not of;

Contact daily and hourly that will not release me;

These selecting--these, in hints, demanded of me.

Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me

Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,

Any more than I am held to the heavens, to the spiritual world,

And to the identities of the Gods, my lovers, faithful and true,

After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.

O such themes! Equalities!

O amazement of things! O divine average!

O warblings under the sun--ushered, as now, or at noon, or setting!

O strain, musical, flowing through ages--now reaching hither,

I take to your reckless and composite chords--I add to them, and cheerfully

pass them forward.

12.

As I have walked in Alabama my morning walk,

I have seen where the she-bird, the mocking-bird, sat on her nest in the

briars, hatching her brood.

I have seen the he-bird also;

I have paused to hear him, near at hand, inflating his throat, and joyfully

singing.

And while I paused, it came to me that what he really sang for was not

there only,

Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes;

But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,

A charge transmitted, and gift occult, for those being born.

13.

Democracy!

Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing.

Ma femme!

For the brood beyond us and of us,

For those who belong here, and those to come,

I, exultant, to be ready for them, will now shake out carols stronger and

haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.

I will make the songs of passion, to give them their way,

And your songs, outlawed offenders--for I scan you with kindred eyes, and

carry you with me the same as any.

I will make the true poem of riches,--

To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres, and goes forward, and

is not dropped by death.

I will effuse egotism, and show it underlying all--and I will be the bard

of personality;

And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the

other;

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present--and can be

none in the future;

And I will show that, whatever happens to anybody, it may be turned to

beautiful results--and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful

than death;

And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are

compact,

And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as

profound as any.

I will not make poems with reference to parts;

But I will make leaves, poems, poemets, songs, says, thoughts, with

reference to ensemble:

And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all

days;

And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a poem, but has reference

to the soul;

Because, having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no

one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul.

14.

Was somebody asking to see the Soul?

See! your own shape and countenance--persons, substances, beasts, the

trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.

All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them:

How can the real body ever die, and be buried?

Of your real body, and any man's or woman's real body,

Item for item, it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and pass to

fitting spheres,

Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the moment of

death.

Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the meaning,

the main concern,

Any more than a man's substance and life, or a woman's substance and life,

return in the body and the soul,

Indifferently before death and after death.

Behold! the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern--and

includes and is the soul;

Whoever you are! how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it.

15.

Whoever you are! to you endless announcements.

Daughter of the lands, did you wait for your poet?

Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand?

Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,

Live words--words to the lands.

O the lands! interlinked, food-yielding lands!

Land of coal and iron! Land of gold! Lands of cotton, sugar, rice!

Land of wheat, beef, pork! Land of wool and hemp! Land of the apple and

grape!

Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! Land of those

sweet-aired interminable plateaus!

Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!

Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west

Colorado winds!

Land of the eastern Chesapeake! Land of the Delaware!

Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!

Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! Land of Vermont and

Connecticut!

Land of the ocean shores! Land of sierras and peaks!

Land of boatmen and sailors! Fishermen's land!

Inextricable lands! the clutched together! the passionate ones!

The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limbed!

The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the

inexperienced sisters!

Far-breathed land! Arctic-braced! Mexican-breezed! the diverse! the

compact!

The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!

O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any rate

include you all with perfect love!

I cannot be discharged from you--not from one, any sooner than another!

O Death! O!--for all that, I am yet of you unseen, this hour, with

irrepressible love,

Walking New England, a friend, a traveller,

Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples, on Paumanok's

sands,

Crossing the prairies--dwelling again in Chicago--dwelling in every town,

Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,

Listening to the orators and the oratresses in public halls,

Of and through the States, as during life[4]--each man and woman my

neighbour,

The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,

The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me--and I yet with any of them;

Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river--yet in my house of adobie,

Yet returning eastward--yet in the Sea-Side State, or in Maryland,

Yet Canadian cheerily braving the winter--the snow and ice welcome to me,

or mounting the Northern Pacific, to Sitka, to Aliaska;

Yet a true son either of Maine, or of the Granite State,[5] or of the

Narragansett Bay State, or of the Empire State;[6]

Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same--yet welcoming every new

brother;

Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones, from the hour they unite with

the old ones;

Coming among the new ones myself, to be their companion and equal--coming

personally to you now;

Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

16.

With me, with firm holding--yet haste, haste on.

For your life, adhere to me;

Of all the men of the earth, I only can unloose you and toughen you;

I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself to

you--but what of that?

Must not Nature be persuaded many times?

No dainty _dolce affettuoso_ I;

Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,

To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe;

For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

17.

On my way a moment I pause;

Here for you! and here for America!

Still the Present I raise aloft--still the Future of the States I harbinge,

glad and sublime;

And for the Past, I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

The red aborigines!

Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and

animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names;

Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta,

Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla;

Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and

the land with names.

18.

O expanding and swift! O henceforth,

Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;

A world primal again--vistas of glory, incessant and branching;

A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far, with new contests,

New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

These my voice announcing--I will sleep no more, but arise;

You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,

stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

19.

See! steamers steaming through my poems!

See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;

See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the

maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;

See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how

they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;

See pastures and forests in my poems--See animals, wild and tame--See,

beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short

curly grass;

See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with

iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce;

See the many-cylindered steam printing-press--See the electric telegraph,

stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan;

See, through Atlantica's depths, pulses American, Europe reaching--pulses

of Europe, duly returned;

See the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the

steam-whistle;

See ploughmen, ploughing farms--See miners, digging mines--See the

numberless factories;

See mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools--See, from among them,

superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working

dresses;

See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me, well-beloved,

close-held by day and night;

Hear the loud echoes of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.

20.

O Camerado close!

O you and me at last--and us two only.

O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!

O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!

O now I triumph--and you shall also;

O hand in hand--O wholesome pleasure--O one more desirer and lover!

O to haste, firm holding--to haste, haste on, with me.

[Footnote 1: Paumanok is the native name of Long Island, State of New York.

It presents a fish-like shape on the map.]

[Footnote 2: Mannahatta, or Manhattan, is (as many readers will know) New

York.]

[Footnote 3: 1856.]

[Footnote 4: The poet here contemplates himself as yet living spiritually

and in his poems after the death of the body, still a friend and brother to

all present and future American lands and persons.]

[Footnote 5: New Hampshire.]

[Footnote 6: New York State.]

_AMERICAN FEUILLAGE._

AMERICA always!

Always our own feuillage!

Always Florida's green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana!

Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!

Always California's golden hills and hollows--and the silver mountains of

New Mexico! Always soft-breathed Cuba!

Always the vast slope drained by the Southern Sea--inseparable with the

slopes drained by the Eastern and Western Seas!

The area the eighty-third year of these States[1]--the three and a half

millions of square miles;

The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main--the

thirty thousand miles of river navigation,

The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings--

Always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches;

Always the free range and diversity! Always the continent of Democracy!

Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travellers, Canada,

the snows;

Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing

the huge oval lakes;

Always the West, with strong native persons--the increasing density there--

the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;

All sights, South, North, East--all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,

All characters, movements, growths--a few noticed, myriads unnoticed.

Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering.

On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats

wooding up:

Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the

Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware;

In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the

hills--or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink;

In a lonesome inlet, a sheldrake, lost from the flock, sitting on the

water, rocking silently;

In farmers' barns, oxen in the stable, their harvest labour done--they rest

standing--they are too tired;

Afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, while her cubs play

around;

The hawk sailing where men have not yet sailed--the farthest polar sea,

ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes;

White drift spooning ahead, where the ship in the tempest dashes.

On solid land, what is done in cities, as the bells all strike midnight

together;

In primitive woods, the sounds there also sounding--the howl of the wolf,

the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk;

In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead Lake, in summer visible

through the clear waters, the great trout swimming;

In lower latitudes, in warmer air, in the Carolinas, the large black

buzzard floating slowly, high beyond the tree-tops,

Below, the red cedar, festooned with tylandria--the pines and cypresses,

growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat;

Rude boats descending the big Pedee--climbing plants, parasites, with

coloured flowers and berries, enveloping huge trees,

The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly

waved by the wind;

The camp of Georgia waggoners, just after dark--the supper-fires, and the

cooking and eating by whites and negroes,

Thirty or forty great waggons--the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from

troughs,

The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees--the

flames--also the black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and

rising;

Southern fishermen fishing--the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's

coast--the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery--the large sweep-

seines--the windlasses on shore worked by horses--the clearing,

curing, and packing houses;

Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the incisions

in the trees--There are the turpentine works,

There are the negroes at work, in good health--the ground in all directions

is covered with pine straw.

--In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by

the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking;

In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully

welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse.

On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under

shelter of high banks,

Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle--others

sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking;

Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the

Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the

plenteous moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree.

--Northward, young men of Mannahatta--the target company from an excursion

returning home at evening--the musket-muzzles all bear bunches of

flowers presented by women;

Children at play--or on his father's lap a young boy fallen asleep, (how

his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!)

The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the Mississippi--he

ascends a knoll and sweeps his eye around.

California life--the miner, bearded, dressed in his rude costume--the

staunch California friendship--the sweet air--the graves one, in

passing, meets, solitary, just aside the horse-path;

Down in Texas, the cotton-field, the negro-cabins--drivers driving mules or

oxen before rude carts--cotton-bales piled on banks and wharves.

Encircling all, vast-darting, up and wide, the American Soul, with equal

hemispheres--one Love, one Dilation or Pride.

--In arriere, the peace-talk with the Iroquois, the aborigines--the

calumet, the pipe of good-will, arbitration, and endorsement,

The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward the

earth,

The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural

exclamations,

The setting-out of the war-party--the long and stealthy march,

The single-file--the swinging hatchets--the surprise and slaughter of

enemies.

--All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes, of these States--

reminiscences, all institutions,

All these States, compact--Every square mile of these States, without

excepting a particle--you also--me also.

Me pleased, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok's fields,

Me, observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies, shuffling

between each other, ascending high in the air;

The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects--the fall-traveller

southward, but returning northward early in the spring;

The country boy at the close of the day, driving the herd of cows, and

shouting to them as they loiter to browse by the roadside;

The city wharf--Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans,

San Francisco,

The departing ships, when the sailors heave at the capstan;

Evening--me in my room--the setting sun,

The setting summer sun shining in my open window, showing the swarm of

flies, suspended, balancing in the air in the centre of the room,

darting athwart, up and down, casting swift shadows in specks on

the opposite wall, where the shine is.

The athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners;

Males, females, immigrants, combinations--the copiousness--the

individuality of the States, each for itself--the money-makers;

Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces--the windlass, lever, pulley--

All certainties,

The certainty of space, increase, freedom, futurity;

In space, the sporades, the scattered islands, the stars--on the firm

earth, the lands, my lands!

O lands! O all so dear to me--what you are (whatever it is), I become a

part of that, whatever it is.

Southward there, I screaming, with wings slow-flapping, with the myriads of

gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida--or in Louisiana, with

pelicans breeding,

Otherways, there, atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the Rio Grande, the

Nueces, the Brazos, the Tombigbee, the Red River, the Saskatchewan,

or the Osage, I with the spring waters laughing and skipping and

running;

Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Paumanok, I, with parties

of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and aquatic plants;

Retreating, triumphantly twittering, the king-bird, from piercing the crow

with its bill, for amusement--And I triumphantly twittering;

The migrating flock of wild geese alighting in autumn to refresh

themselves--the body of the flock feed--the sentinels outside move

around with erect heads watching, and are from time to time

relieved by other sentinels--And I feeding and taking turns with

the rest;

In Canadian forests, the moose, large as an ox, cornered by hunters, rising

desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with his fore-feet, the

hoofs as sharp as knives--And I plunging at the hunters, cornered

and desperate;

In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, store-houses, and the

countless workmen working in the shops,

And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof--and no less in myself than

the whole of the Mannahatta in itself,

Singing the song of These, my ever-united lands--my body no more inevitably

united part to part, and made one identity, any more than my lands

are inevitably united, and made ONE IDENTITY;

Nativities, climates, the grass of the great pastoral plains,

Cities, labours, death, animals, products, good and evil--these me,--

These affording, in all their particulars, endless feuillage to me and to

America, how can I do less than pass the clue of the union of them, to

afford the like to you?

Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you also be

eligible as I am?

How can I but, as here, chanting, invite you for yourself to collect

bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States?

[Footnote 1: 1858-59.]

_THE PAST-PRESENT._

I was looking a long while for the history of the past for myself, and for

these chants--and now I have found it.

It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither accept

nor reject;)

It is no more in the legends than in all else;

It is in the present--it is this earth to-day;

It is in Democracy--in this America--the Old World also;

It is the life of one man or one woman to-day, the average man of to-day;

It is languages, social customs, literatures, arts;

It is the broad show of artificial things, ships, machinery, politics,

creeds, modern improvements, and the interchange of nations,

All for the average man of to-day.

_YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED._

Years of the unperformed! your horizon rises--I see it part away for more

august dramas;

I see not America only--I see not only Liberty's nation but other nations

embattling;

I see tremendous entrances and exits--I see new combinations--I see the

solidarity of races;

I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's stage;

Have the old forces played their parts? are the acts suitable to them

closed?

I see Freedom, completely armed, and victorious, and very haughty, with Law

by her side, both issuing forth against the idea of caste;

--What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?

I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions!

I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken;

I see the landmarks of European kings removed;

I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, all others give way;

Never were such sharp questions asked as this day;

Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God.

Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest;

His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere--he colonises the Pacific,

the archipelagoes;

With the steam-ship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale

engines of war,

With these, and the world-spreading factories, he interlinks all geography,

all lands;

--What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the

seas?

Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?

Is humanity forming _en masse_?--for lo! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim;

The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war;

No one knows what will happen next--such portents fill the days and nights.

Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it,

is full of phantoms;

Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me;

This incredible rush and heat--this strange ecstatic fever of dreams, O

years!

Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I

sleep or wake!)

The performed America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,

The unperformed, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.

_FLUX._

Of these years I sing,

How they pass through convulsed pains, as through parturitions;

How America illustrates birth, gigantic youth, the promise, the sure

fulfilment, despite of people--Illustrates evil as well as good;

How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths,

obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity;

How few see the arrived models, the athletes, the States--or see freedom or

spirituality--or hold any faith in results.

But I see the athletes--and I see the results glorious and inevitable--and

they again leading to other results;

How the great cities appear--How the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful,

as I love them,

How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and

resounding, keep on and on;

How society waits unformed, and is between things ended and things begun;

How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of freedom, and

of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society, and of all that

is begun;

And how the States are complete in themselves--And how all triumphs and

glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward,

And how these of mine, and of the States, will in their turn be convulsed,

and serve other parturitions and transitions.

And how all people, sights, combinations, the Democratic masses, too,

serve--and how every fact serves,

And how now, or at any time, each serves the exquisite transition of Death.

_TO WORKING MEN._

1.

Come closer to me;

Push close, my lovers, and take the best I possess;

Yield closer and closer, and give me the best you possess.

This is unfinished business with me--How is it with you?

(I was chilled with the cold types, cylinder, wet paper between us.)

Male and Female!

I pass so poorly with paper and types, I must pass with the contact of

bodies and souls.

American masses!

I do not thank you for liking me as I am, and liking the touch of me--I

know that it is good for you to do so.

2.

This is the poem of occupations;

In the labour of engines and trades, and the labour of fields, I find the

developments,

And find the eternal meanings.

Workmen and Workwomen!

Were all educations, practical and ornamental, well displayed out of me,

what would it amount to?

Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise statesman, what

would it amount to?

Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you?

The learned, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual terms;

A man like me, and never the usual terms.

Neither a servant nor a master am I;

I take no sooner a large price than a small price--I will have my own,

whoever enjoys me;

I will be even with you, and you shall be even with me.

If you stand at work in a shop, I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same

shop;

If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend, I demand as good as

your brother or dearest friend;

If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be

personally as welcome;

If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake;

If you remember your foolish and outlawed deeds, do you think I cannot

remember my own foolish and outlawed deeds?

If you carouse at the table, I carouse at the opposite side of the table;

If you meet some stranger in the streets, and love him or her--why I often

meet strangers in the street, and love them.

Why, what have you thought of yourself?

Is it you then that thought yourself less?

Is it you that thought the President greater than you?

Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

Because you are greasy or pimpled, or that you was once drunk, or a thief,

Or diseased, or rheumatic, or a prostitute, or are so now;

Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar, and never saw

your name in print,

Do you give in that you are any less immortal?

3.

Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard, untouchable

and untouching;

It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether you are

alive or no;

I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns.

Grown, half-grown, and babe, of this country and every country, indoors and

outdoors, one just as much as the other, I see,

And all else behind or through them.

The wife--and she is not one jot less than the husband;

The daughter--and she is just as good as the son;

The mother--and she is every bit as much as the father.

Offspring of ignorant and poor, boys apprenticed to trades,

Young fellows working on farms, and old fellows working on farms,

Sailor-men, merchant-men, coasters, immigrants,

All these I see--but nigher and farther the same I see;

None shall escape me, and none shall wish to escape me.

I bring what you much need, yet always have,

Not money, amours, dress, eating, but as good;

I send no agent or medium, offer no representative of value, but offer the

value itself.

There is something that comes home to one now and perpetually;

It is not what is printed, preached, discussed--it eludes discussion and

print;

It is not to be put in a book--it is not in this book;

It is for you, whoever you are--it is no farther from you than your hearing

and sight are from you;

It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest--it is ever provoked by them.

You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it;

You may read the President's Message, and read nothing about it there;

Nothing in the reports from the State department or Treasury department, or

in the daily papers or the weekly papers,

Or in the census or revenue returns, prices current, or any accounts of

stock.

4.

The sun and stars that float in the open air;

The apple-shaped earth, and we upon it--surely the drift of them is

something grand!

I do not know what it is, except that it is grand, and that it is

happiness,

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot,

or reconnoissance,

And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and

without luck must be a failure for us,

And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

The light and shade, the curious sense of body and identity, the greed that

with perfect complaisance devours all things, the endless pride and

outstretching of man, unspeakable joys and sorrows,

The wonder every one sees in every one else he sees, and the wonders that

fill each minute of time for ever,

What have you reckoned them for, camerado?

Have you reckoned them for a trade, or farm-work? or for the profits of a

store?

Or to achieve yourself a position? or to fill a gentleman's leisure, or a

lady's leisure?

Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it might be

painted in a picture?

Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?

Or the attraction of gravity, and the great laws and harmonious

combinations, and the fluids of the air, as subjects for the

savans?

Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?

Or the stars to be put in constellations and named fancy names?

Or that the growth of seeds is for agricultural tables, or agriculture

itself?

Old institutions--these arts, libraries, legends, collections, and the

practice handed along in manufactures--will we rate them so high?

Will we rate our cash and business high?--I have no objection;

I rate them as high as the highest--then a child born of a woman and man I

rate beyond all rate.

We thought our Union grand, and our Constitution grand;

I do not say they are not grand and good, for they are;

I am this day just as much in love with them as you;

Then I am in love with you, and with all my fellows upon the earth.

We consider Bibles and religions divine--I do not say they are not divine;

I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still;

It is not they who give the life--it is you who give the life;

Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they

are shed out of you.

5.

When the psalm sings, instead of the singer;

When the script preaches, instead of the preacher;

When the pulpit descends and goes, instead of the carver that carved the

supporting desk;

When I can touch the body of books, by night or by day, and when they touch

my body back again;

When a university course convinces, like a slumbering woman and child

convince;

When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman's

daughter;

When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite, and are my friendly

companions;

I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do of men and

women like you.

The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;

The President is there in the White House for you--it is not you who are

here for him;

The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you--not you here for them;

The Congress convenes every twelfth month for you;

Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and

coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.

List close, my scholars dear!

All doctrines, all politics and civilisation, exsurge from you;

All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are tallied

in you;

The gist of histories and statistics, as far back as the records reach, is

in you this hour, and myths and tales the same;

If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?

The most renowned poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be

vacuums.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;

Did you think it was in the white or grey stone? or the lines of the arches

and cornices?

All music is what awakes from you, when you are reminded by the

instruments;

It is not the violins and the cornets--it is not the oboe nor the beating

drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet

romanza--nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the women's

chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they.

6.

Will the whole come back then?

Can each see signs of the best by a look in the looking-glass? is there

nothing greater or more?

Does all sit there with you, with the mystic, unseen soul?

Strange and hard that paradox true I give;

Objects gross and the unseen Soul are one.