Published Works Manuscripts Biography & Correspondence Criticism Resources Pictures & Sound About the Archive

Poems by Walt Whitman

Selected and Edited by William Michael Rossetti (1868).

POEMS

BY

WALT WHITMAN.

SELECTED AND EDITED

BY

WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI.

Or si sa il nome, o per tristo o per buono,

E si sa pure al mondo ch’io ci sono.

world in clouds

LONDON:
JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, PICCADILLY.
1868.

That angels are human forms, or men, I have seen a thousand
times. I have also frequently told them that men in the Christian
world are in such gross ignorance respecting Angels and Spirits as to
suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts, of which
they have no other idea than as something ethereal possessing a vital
principle. To the first or ultimate heaven also correspond the forms
of man’s body, called its members, organs, and viscera. Thus the
corporeal part of man is that in which heaven ultimately closes, and
upon which, as on its base, it rests.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a nation that it get an articulate
voice—that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what
the heart of it means.

Les efforts de vos ennemis contre vous, leurs cris, leur rage impuis- sante, et leurs petits succès, ne doivent pas vous effrayer; ce ne sont
que des égratignures sur les épaules d’ ’Hercule.

OUR Portrait of Whitman is (as stated in the Prefatory Notice)
re-engraved from the excellent Portrait, after a daguerreotype,
given in the original "LEAVES OF GRASS," edition of 1855. We are
not aware that any other engraved likeness of Whitman is extant; and
have considered it on the whole more safe and satisfactory to take this
fine record of the poet in his earlier prime than to risk the chances of
engraving at first hand from a photograph of his present more matured
aspect.

TO WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.

DEAR SCOTT;—Among various gifts which I have
received from you, tangible and intangible, was a copy of
the original quarto edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,
which you presented to me soon after its first appearance
in 1855. At a time when few people on this side of the
Atlantic had looked into the book, and still fewer had
found in it anything save matter for ridicule, you had
appraised it, and seen that its value was real and great.
A true poet and a strong thinker like yourself was indeed
likely to see that. I read the book eagerly, and perceived
that its substantiality and power were still ahead of any
eulogium with which it might have been commended to
me—and, in fact, ahead of most attempts that could be
made at verbal definition of them.

Some years afterwards, getting to know our friend
Swinburne, I found with much satisfaction that he also
was an ardent (not of course a blind) admirer of Whitman.
Satisfaction, and a degree almost of surprise; for his
intense sense of poetic refinement of form in his own

works, and his exacting acuteness as a critic, might have
seemed likely to carry him away from Whitman in sym-
pathy at least, if not in actual latitude of perception.
Those who find the American poet "utterly formless,"
"intolerably rough and floundering," "destitute of the
A B C of art," and the like, might not unprofitably ponder
this very different estimate of him by the author of
Atalanta in Calydon.

May we hope that now, twelve years after the first
appearance of Leaves of Grass, the English reading public
may be prepared for a selection of Whitman’s poems, and
soon hereafter for a complete edition of them? I trust
this may prove to be the case. At any rate, it has been
a great gratification to me to be concerned in the experi-
ment; and this is enhanced by my being enabled to as-
sociate with it your name, as that of an early and well-
qualified appreciator of Whitman, and no less as that
of a dear friend.

Yours affectionately,

W. M. ROSSETTI.

October 1867.

CONTENTS.

___________

	PAGE
PREFATORY NOTICE	1
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF LEAVES OF GRASS	29
CHANTS DEMOCRATIC:
Starting from Paumanok	67
American Feuillage	88
The Past-Present	96
Years of the Unperformed	97
Flux	99
To Working-Men	101
Song of the Broad-axe	114
Antecedents	131
Salut Au Monde!	135
A Broadway Pageant (Reception of the Japanese Embassy,
June 16, 1860)	154
Old Ireland	160
Boston Town	162
France, the 18th year of these States	166
Europe, the 72nd and 73rd years of these States	168
To a foiled Revolter or Revoltress	171
DRUM-TAPS:
Manhattan Arming	177
1861	181
The Uprising	183

	PAGE
DRUM-TAPS (continued):
Beat! beat! Drums	187
Song of the Banner at Daybreak	189
The Bivouac’s Flame	199
Bivouac on a Mountain Side	200
City of Ships	201
Vigil on the Field	202
The Flag	204
The Wounded	205
A Sight in Camp	207
A Grave	208
The Dresser	209
A Letter from Camp	214
War Dreams	217
The Veteran’s Vision	218
O Tan-faced Prairie Boy	220
Manhattan Faces	221
Over the Carnage	224
The Mother of All	226
Camps of Green	227
Dirge for Two Veterans	229
Survivors	231
Hymn of Dead Soldiers	232
Spirit whose Work is Done	235
Reconciliation	236
After the War	237
WALT WHITMAN:
Assimilations	241
A World Out of the Sea	244
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry	255
Night and Death	266

	PAGE
WALT WHITMAN (continued):
Elemental Drifts	268
Wonders	272
Miracles	275
Visages	277
The Dark Side	278
Music	279
Wherefore?	280
Questionable	281
Song at Sunset	282
Longings for Home	285
Appearances	288
The Friend	289
Meeting Again	290
A Dream	292
Parting Friends	293
To a Stranger	293
Other Lands	294
Envy	295
The City of Friends	296
Out of the Crowd	296
Among the Multitude	297
LEAVES OF GRASS:
President Lincoln’s Funeral Hymn	301
O Captain! My Captain! (for the Death of Lincoln)	315
Pioneers! O Pioneers	316
To the Sayers of Words	324
Voices	334
Whosoever	335
Beginners	339
To a Pupil	339

	PAGE
LEAVES OF GRASS (continued):
Links	340
The Waters	342
To the States, to identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presi-
dentiad	343
Tears	344
A Ship	345
Greatnesses	346
The Poet	351
Burial	355
This Compost	366
Despairing Cries	370
The City Dead-House	370
To One Shortly to Die	372
Unnamed Lands	373
Similitude	375
The Square Deific	377
SONGS OF PARTING:
Singers and Poets	383
To a Historian	385
Fit Audience	386
Singing in Spring	389
Love of Comrades	391
Pulse of My Life	392
Auxiliaries	393
Realities	393
Nearing Departure	395
Poets to Come	396
Centuries Hence	396
So Long!	397

PREFATORY NOTICE.

___________

DURING the summer of 1867 I had the opportunity
(which I had often wished for) of expressing in
print my estimate and admiration of the works of the
American poet Walt Whitman.* Like a stone dropped
into a pond, an article of that sort may spread out its
concentric circles of consequences. One of these is the
invitation which I have received to edit a selection from
Whitman’s writings: virtually the first sample of his
work ever published in England, and offering the first
tolerably fair chance he has had of making his way with
English readers on his own showing. Hitherto, such
reader—except the small percentage of them to whom it
has happened to come across the poems in some one of
their American editions—have picked acquaintance with
them only through the medium of newspaper extracts
and criticisms, mostly short-sighted, sneering, and depre-
ciatory, and rather intercepting than forwarding the candid

* See The Chronicle for 6th July 1867, article Walt Whitman’s
Poems.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

construction which people mich be willing to put upon
the poems, alike in their beauties and their aberrations.
Some English critics, no doubt, have been more discern-
ing—as W. J. Fox, of old, in the Dispatch, the writer of
the notice in the Leader, and of late two on the Pall Mall
Gazette and the London Review;* but these have been the
exceptions among us, the great majority of the reviewers
presenting that happy and familiar critical combination—
scurrility and superciliousness.

As it was my lot to set down so recently several of the
considerations which seem to me most essential and most
obvious in regard to Whitman’s writings, I can scarcely
now recur to the subject without either repeating some-
thing of what I then said, or else leaving unstated some
points of principal importance. I shall therefore adopt
the simplest course—that of summarizing the critical re-
marks in my former article; after which, I shall leave
without further development (ample as is the amount of
development most of them would claim) the particular
topics there glanced at, and shall proceed to some other
phases of the subject.

Whitman republished in 1867 his complete poetical
works in one moderate-sized volume, consisting of the
whole Leaves of Grass, with a sort of supplement thereto

* Since this Prefatory Notice was written, another eulogistic
review of Whitman has appeared—that by Mr. Robert Buchanan,
in the Broadway.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

named Songs before Parting,* and of the Drum Taps,
with its Sequel. It has been intimated that he does not exe
pect to write any more poems, unless it might be in expres-
sion of the religious side of man’s nature. However, one
poem on the last American harvest, sown and reaped by
those who had been soldiers in the great war, has already
appeared since the volume in question, and has been re-
published in England.

Whitman’s poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a
couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed,
may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of
poetry, such as Shakespeare furnishes the precedent for in
drama. Still there is a very powerful and majestic
rhythmical sense throughout.

Lavish and persistent has been the abuse poured forth
upon Whitman by his own countrymen; the tricklings of
the British press give but a moderate idea of it. The
poet is known to repay scorn with scorn. Emerson can,
however, from the first be claimed as on Whitman’s side;
nor, it is understood after some enquiry, has the great
thinker since then retreated from this position in funda-
mentals, although his admiration may have entailed some
worry upon him, and reports of his recantation had been
rife. Of other writers on Whitman’s side, expressing
themselves with no measured enthusiasm, one may cite

* In a copy of the book revised by Whitman himself, which we have seen, this title is modified into Songs of Parting.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

Mr. M. D. Conway; Mr. W. D. O’Connor, who wrote a
pamphlet named The Good Gret Poet; and Mr. John
Burroughs, author of Walt Whitman as Poet and
Person, published quite recently in New York. His
thorough-paced admirers declare Whitman to be beyond
rivalry the poet of the epoch; an estimate which, startling
as it will sound at the first, may nevertheless be upheld,
on the grounds that Whitman is beyond all his com-
petitors a man of the period, one of audacious personal
ascendant, incapable of all compromise, and an initiator in
the scheme and form of his works.

Certain faults are charged against him, and, as far as
they are true, shall frankly stand confessed—some of them
as very serious faults. Firstly, he speaks on occasion of
gross things in gross, crude, or plain terms. Secondly,
he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which
produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty
literature. Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being
obscure, fragmentary, and agglomerative—giving long
strings of successive and detached items, not, however,
devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his
self-assertion is boundless; yet not always to be under-
stood as strictly or merely personal to himself, but some-
times as vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all men,
and every man and woman. These and any other faults
appear most harshly on a cursory reading; Whitman is a
poet who bears and needs to be read as a whole, and then

PREFATORY NOTICE.

the volume and torrent of his power carry the disfigure-
ments along with it, and away.

The subject-matter of Whitman’s poems, taken indi-
vidually, is absolutely miscellaneous: he touches upon
any and every subject. But he has prefixed to his last
edition an "Inscription" in the following terms, showing
that the key-words of the whole book are two—"One’s-
self" and "En Masse:"—

Small is the theme of the following chant, yet the greatest—namely,

ONE’S-SELF; that wondrous thing, a simple separate person.

That, for the use of the New World, I sing.
Man’s physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not physiog-

nomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse: I say

the form complete is worthier far. The female equally with

the male I sing.
Nor cease at the theme of One’s-self. I speak the word of the

modern, the word EN MASSE.
My days I sing, and the lands—with interstice I knew of hapless

war.
O friend, whoe’er you are, at last arriving hither to commence, I feel

through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I return.

And thus upon our journey linked together let us go.

The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of
Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added, of
American nationalism. It is par excellence the modern
poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity—that
in it the most literal view of things is continually merging
into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Pic-

PREFATORY NOTICE.

turesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat patriarchal
kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the
littérateur; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may
even be caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another
most prominent and pervading quality of the book is the
exuberant physique of the author. The conceptions are
throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter
much under different conditions.

Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman’s
writing. He is both a realist and an optimist in extreme
measure: he contemplates evil as in some sense not
existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much im-
portance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist;
on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor of the
soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible asso-
ciate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither
does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of
his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national
and other developments, being an effectual bar to this.
The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one
may sometimes find them in conflict with what has pre-
ceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at
any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This is
mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things, and
to the immense width of relation in which Whitman stands
to all sorts and all aspects of them.

But the greatest of this poet’s distinctions is his absolute

PREFATORY NOTICE.

and entire originality. He may be termed formless by
those who, not without much reason to show for them-
selves, are wedded to the established forms and ratified
refinements of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to
enlarge the canon till it includes so great and startling a
genius, rather than to draw it close and exclude him.
His work is practically certain to stand as archetypal for
many future poetic efforts—so great is his power as an
originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably
the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor
Hugo’s Légende des Siècles alone might be named with
it for largeness, and even that with much less of a new
starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman
breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives
and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind;
to anything in the way of prescription, no relation at all.
But he is saved from isolation by the depth of his Ameri-
canism; with the movement of his predominant nation he
is moved. His comprehension, energy, and tenderness, are
all extreme, and all inspired by actualities. And, as for
poetic genius, those who, without being ready to concede
that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic boldness
and his Titanic power of temperament, working in the
sphere of poetry, do in effect confess his genius as
well.

Such, still further condensed, was the critical summary
which I gave of Whitman’s position among poets. It

PREFATORY NOTICE.

remains to say something a little more precise of the
particular qualities of his works. And first, not to slur
over defects, I shall extract some sentences from a letter
which a friend, most highly entitled to form and express an
opinion on any poetic question—one, too, who abundantly
upholds the greatness of Whitman as a poet—has addres-
sed to me with regard to the criticism above condensed.
His observations, though severe on this individual point,
appear to me not other than correct. "I don’t think
that you quite put strength enough into your blame on
one side, while you make at least enough of minor faults
or eccentricities. To me it seems always that Whitman’s
great flaw is a fault of debility, not an excess of strength
—I mean his bluster. His own personal and national self-
reliance and arrogance, I need not tell you, I applaud,
and sympathize and rejoice in; but the blatant ebullience
of feeling and speech, at times, is feeble for so great a
poet of so great a people. He is in part certainly the poet
of democracy; but not wholly, because he tries so openly to
be, and asserts so violently that he is—always as if he was
fighting the cause out on a platform. This is the only thing
I really or greatly dislike or revolt from. On the whole"
(adds my correspondent) "my admiration and enjoyment
of his greatness grow keener and warmer every time I
think of him"—a feeling, I may be permitted to ob-
serve, which is fully shared by myself, and, I suppose,
by all who consent in any adequate measure to re-

PREFATORY NOTICE.

cognise Whitman, and to yield themselves to his in-
fluence.

To continue. Besides originality and daring, which
have been already insisted upon, width and intensity are
leading characteristics of his writings—width both
of subject-matter and of comprehension, intensity of
self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and
expresses. He scans and presents and enormous panorama,
unrolled before him as from a mountain-top; and yet
whatever most large or most minute or casual thing his
eye glances upon, that he enters into with a depth of
affection which identifies him with it for the time, be the
object what it may. There is a singular interchange
also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion.
While he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and
sympathy, as men, he sees them also "as trees walking,"
and admits us to perceive that the whole show is in a
measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a
larger and profounder reality beneath it, of which it is
giving perpetual intimations and auguries. He is the poet
indeed of literality, but of passionate and significant
literality, full of indirections as well as directness, and of
readings between the lines. If he is the ’cutest of Yankees,
he is also as truly an enthusiast as any the most typical poet.
All his faculties and performance glow into a white
heat of brotherliness; and there is a poignancy both of
tenderness and of beauty about his finer works which

PREFATORY NOTICE.

discriminates them quite as much as their modernness,
audacity, or any other exceptional point. If the reader
wishes to see the great and more intimate powers of
Whitman in their fullest expression, he may consult the
Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln; than which it would
be difficult to find anywhere a purer, more elevated,
more poetic, more ideally abstract, or at the same time
more pathetically personal, threnody—uniting the thrilling
chords of grief, of beauty, of triumph, and of final un-
fathomed satisfaction. With all his singularities, Whitman
is a master of words and of sounds: he has them at his
command—made for, and instinct with, his purpose—
messengers of unsurpassable sympathy and intelligence
between himself and his readers. The entire book may
be called the pæan of the natural man—not of the merely
physical, still less of the disjunctively intellectual or
spiritual man, but of him who, being a man first and fore-
most, is therein also a spirit and an intellect.

There is a singular and impressive intuition or revela-
tion of Swedenborg’s: that the whole of heaven is in the
form of one man, and the separate societies of heaven in
the forms of the several parts of man. In a large sense,
the general drift of Whitman’s writings, even down to the
passages which read as most bluntly physical, bear a
striking correspondence or analogy to this dogma. He
takes man, and every organism and faculty of man, as the
unit—the datum—from which all that we know, discern,

PREFATORY NOTICE.

and speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of
concrete and sensual, has to be computed. He knows of
nothing nobler than that unit man; but, knowing that, he
can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical exten-
sion or recast.

Let us next obtain some idea of what this most remark-
able poet—the founder of American poetry rightly to be so
called, and the most sonorous poetic voice of the tangibi-
lities of actual and prospective democracy—is in his proper
life and person.

Walt Whitman (we infer that he was in fact baptized
Walter, like his father, but he always uses the name Walt)
was born at the farm-village of West Hills, Long Island,
in the State of New York, and about thirty miles distant
from the capital, on the 31st of May 1819. His father’s
family, English by origin, had already been settled in this
locality for five generations. His mother, named Louisa
van Velsor, was of Dutch extraction, and came from Cold
Spring, Queen’s Country, about three miles from West
Hills. "A fine-looking old lady" she has been termed in
her advanced age. A large family ensued from the mar-
riage. The father was a farmer, and afterwards a car-
penter and builder: both parents adhered in religion to
"the great Quaker iconoclast, Elias Hicks." Walt was
schooled at Brooklyn, a suburb of New York, and began
life at the age of thirteen, working as a printer, later on as a
country teacher, and then as a miscellaneous press-writer in

PREFATORY NOTICE.

New York. From 1837 to 1848 he had, as Mr. Burroughs
too promiscuously expresses it, "sounded all experiences of
life, with all their passions, pleasures, and abandonments."
In 1849 he began travelling; and became at New Orleans a
newspaper editor, and at Brooklyn, two years afterwards,
a printer. He next followed his father’s business of car-
penter and builder. In 1862, after the breaking-out of
the great Civil War, in which his enthusiastic unionism
and also his anti-slavery feelings attached him inseparably
though not rancorously to the good cause of the North,
he undertook the nursing of the sick and wounded in the
field, writing also a correspondence in the New York
Times. I am informed that it was through Emerson’s
intervention that he obtained the sanction of President
Lincoln for this purpose of charity, with authority to
draw the ordinary army rations; Whitman stipulating at
the same time that he would not receive any remunera-
tion for his services. The first immediate occasion of his
going down to cam was on behalf of his brother, Lieu-
tenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st New
York Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a
piece of shell at Fredericksburg. From the spring of
1863, this nursing, both in the field and more especially
in hospital at Washington, became his "one daily and
nightly occupation;" and the strongest testimony is borne
to his measureless self-devotion and kindliness in the
work, and to the unbounded fascination, a kind of magnetic

PREFATORY NOTICE.

attraction and ascendency, which he exercised over the
patients, often with the happiest sanitary results. North-
erner or Southerner, the belligerents received the same
tending from him. It is said that by the end of the war
he had personally ministered to upwards of 100,000 sick
and wounded. In a Washington hospital he caught, in
the summer of 1864, the first illness he had ever known,
caused by poison absorbed into the system in attending
some of the worst causes of gangrene. It disabled him for
six months. He returned to the hospitals towards the
beginning of 1865, and obtained also a clerkship in the
Department of the Interior. It should be added that,
though he never actually joined the army as a combatant,
he made a point of putting down his name on the enrol-
ment-lists for the draft, to take his chance as it might
happen for serving the country in arms. The reward of
his devotedness came at the end of June 1856, in the
form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr.
Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the
Leaves of Grass: a book whose outspokenness, or (as
the official chief considered it) immorality, raised a holy
horror in the ministerial breast. The poet, however,
soon obtained another modest but creditable post in the
office of the Attorney-General. He still visits the
hospitals on Sundays, and often on other days as
well.

The portrait of Mr. Whitman reproduced in the present

PREFATORY NOTICE.

volume is taken from an engraving after a daguerreotype
given in the original Leaves of Grass. He is much above
the average size, and noticeably well-proportioned—a
model of physique and health, and, by natural con-
sequence, as fully and finely related to all physical facts
by his bodily constitution as to all mental and spiritual
facts by his mind and his consciousness. He is now, how-
ever, old-looking for his years, and might even (according
to the statement of one of his enthusiasts, Mr. O’Connor)
have passed for being beyond the age for the draft when
the war was going on. The same gentleman, in confuta-
tion of any inferences which might be drawn from the
Leaves of Grass by a Harlan or other Holy Willie, affirms
that "one more irreproachable in his relations to the other
sex lives not upon this earth"—an assertion which one
must take as one finds it, having neither confirmatory nor
traversing evidence at hand. Whitman has light blue
eyes, a florid complexion, a fleecy beard now grey, and a
quite peculiar sort of magnetism about him in relation to
those with whom he comes in contact. His ordinary
appearance is masculine and cheerful: he never shows
depression of spirits, and is sufficiently undemonstrative,
and even somewhat silent in company. He has always
been carried by predilection towards the society of the
common people; but is not the less for that open to
refined and artistic impressions—fond of operatic and
other good music, and discerning in works of art. As to

PREFATORY NOTICE.

either praise or blame of what he writes, he is totally in-
different, not to say scornful—having in fact a very
decisive opinion of his own concerning its calibre and
destinies. Thoreau, a very congenial spirit, said of
Whitman "He is Democracy;" and again, "After all,
he suggests something a little more than human." Lincoln
broke out into the exclamation "Well, he looks like a
man!" Whitman responded to the instinctive apprecia-
tion of the President, considering him (it is said by Mr.
Burroughs) "by far the noblest and purest of the political
characters of the time;" and, if anything can cast, in the
eyes of posterity, an added halo of brightness round the
unsullied personal qualities and the great doings of Lincoln,
it will assuredly be the written monument reared to him
by Whitman.

The best sketch that I know of Whitman as an acces-
sible human individual is that given by Mr. Conway.* I
borrow from it with the following few details. "Having occa-
sion to visit New York soon after the appearance of
Walt Whitman’s book, I was urged by some friends to
search him out. . . The day was excessively hot, the
thermometer at nearly 100º, and the sun blazed down
as only on sandy Long Island can the sun blaze. . . I
saw stretched upon his back, and gazing up straight at
the terrible sun, the man I was seeking. With his grey

* In the Fortnightly Review, 15th October 1866.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

clothing, his blue-grey shirt, his iron-grey hair, his swart
sunburnt face and bare neck, he lay upon the brown-and-
white grass—for the sun had burnt away its greenness—
and was so like the earth upon which he rested that he
seemed almost enough a part of it for one to pass by
without recognition. I approached him, gave my name
and reason for searching him out, and asked him if he did
not find the sun rather hot. ’Not at all too hot,’ was his
reply; and he confided to me that this was one of his
favourite places and attitudes for composing ’poems.’ He
then walked with me to his home, and took me along its
narrow ways to his room. A small room of about fifteen
feet square, with a single window looking out on the barren
solitudes of the island; a small cot, a wash-stand with a
little looking-glass hung over it from a tack in the wall, a
pine table with pen, ink, and paper, on it; an old line-
engraving representing Bacchus, hung on the wall, and
opposite a similar one of Silenus; these constituted the
visible environments of Walt Whitman. There was not,
apparently, a single book in the room. . . The books he
seemed to know and love best were the Bible, Homer,
and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in
his pockets while we were talking. He had two studies
where he read; one was the top of an omnibus, and the
other a small mass of sand, then entirely uninhabited, far
out in the ocean, called Coney Island. . . The only dis-
tinguished contemporary he had ever met was the Rev.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn, who had visited
him. . . He confessed to having no talent for industry,
and that his forte was ’loafing and writing poems:’ he
was poor, but had discovered that he could, on the whole,
live magnificently on bread and water. . . On no occasion
did he laugh, nor indeed did I ever see him smile."

The first trace of Whitman as a writer is in the pages
of the Democratic Review in or about 1841. Here he
wrote some prose tales and sketches—poor stuff mostly,
so far as I have seen of them, yet not to be wholly con-
founded with the commonplace. One of them is a tragic
school-incident, which may be surmised to have fallen
under his personal observation in his early experience as
a teacher. His first poem of any sort was named Blood
Money, in denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Law, which
severed him from the Democratic party. His first con-
siderable work was the Leaves of Grass. He began it
in 1853, and it underwent two or three complete re-
writings prior to its publication at Brooklyn in 1855, in a
quarto volume—peculiar-looking, but with something per-
ceptibly artistic about it. The type of that edition was
set up entirely by himself. He was moved to undertake
this formidable poetic work (as indicated in a private letter
of Whitman’s, from which Mr. Conway has given a sentence
or two) by his sense of the great materials which America
could offer for a really American poetry, and by his con-
tempt for the current work of his compatriots—"either

PREFATORY NOTICE.

the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, at bottom
nothing but maudlin puerilities or more or less musical
verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and enervation
as their result; or else that class of poetry, plays, &c., of
which the foundation is feudalism, with its ideas of lords
and ladies, its imported standard of gentility, and the
manners of European high-life-below-stairs in every line
and verse." Thus incited to poetic self-expression,
Whitman (adds Mr. Conway) "wrote on a sheet of paper,
in large letters, these words ’Make the Work,’ and fixed
it above his table, where he could always see it whilst
writing. Thenceforth every cloud that flitted over him,
every distant sail, every face and form encountered, wrote
a line in his book."

The Leaves of Grass excited no sort of notice
until a letter from Emerson* appeared, expressing a
deep sense of its power and magnitude. He termed
it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom
that America has yet contributed." The edition of
about a thousand copies sold off in less than a
year. Towards the end of 1856 a second edition in
16mo appeared, printed in New York, also of about a

* Mr. Burroughs (to whom I have recourse for most biographical
facts concerning Whitman) is careful to note, in order that no mis-
apprehension may arise on the subject, that, up to the time of his
publishing the Leaves of Grass, the author had not read either the
essays or the poems of Emerson.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

thousand copies. Its chief feature was an additional poem
beginning "A Woman waits for me." It excited a con-
siderable storm. Another edition, of about four to five
thousand copies, duodecimo, came out at Boston in
1860-61, including a number of new pieces. The Drum
Taps, consequent upon the war, with their Sequel which
comprises the poem on Lincoln, followed in 1865; and in
1867, as I have already noted, a complete edition of all
the poems, including a supplement named Songs before
Parting. The first of all the Leaves of Grass, in point
of date, was the long and powerful composition, entitled,
Walt Whitman—perhaps the most typical and memo-
rable of all his productions, but shut out from the
present selection for reasons given further on. The final
edition shows numerous and considerable variations from
all its precursors; evidencing once again that Whitman is
by no means the rough-and-ready writer, panoplied in rude
art and egotistic self-sufficiency, that many people suppose
him to be. Even since this issue, the book has been
slightly revised by its author’s own hand, with a special
view to possible English circulation. The copy so revised
has reached me (through the liberal and friendly hands of
Mr. Conway) after my selection had already been decided
on; and the few departures from the last printed text
which might on comparison be found in the present volume
are due to my having had the advantage of following this
revise copy. In all other respects I have felt bound to

PREFATORY NOTICE.

reproduce the last edition, without so much as considering
whether here and there I might personally prefer the
readings of the earlier issues.

The selection here offered to the English reader con-
tains a little less than half the entire bulk of Whitman’s
poetry. My choice has proceeded upon two simple rules:
first, to omit entirely every poem which could with any
tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the feelings of
morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous age; and,
second, to include every remaining poem which appeared
to me of conspicuous beauty or interest. I have also in-
serted the very remarkable prose preface which Whitman
printed in the original edition of Leaves of Grass, an
edition that has become a literary rarity. This preface
has not been reproduced in any later publication, although
its materials have to some extent been worked up into
poems of a subsequent date.* From this prose composition,
contrary to what has been my rule with any of the poems,
it has appeared to me permissible to omit two or three
short phrases which would have shocked ordinary readers,
and the retention of which, had I held it obligatory, would
have entailed the exclusion of the preface itself as a whole.

A few words must be added to the indecencies scattered
through Whitman’s writings. Indecencies or improprie-
ties—or, still better, deforming crudities—they may rightly

* Compare, for instance, the Preface, pp. 49, 50, with the poem
To a Foiled Revolter or Revoltress, p. 171.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

be termed; to call them immoralities would be going too
far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women,
to be a compound of soul and body; he finds that body
plays an extremely prominent and determining part in
whatever he and other mundane dwellers have cognizance
of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of
things, and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it,
the right condition; and he knows of no reason why what
is universally seen and known, necessary and right, should
not also be allowed and proclaimed in speech. That such
a view of the matter is entitled to a great deal of weight,
and at any rate to candid consideration and construction,
appears to me not to admit of a doubt; neither is it dubious
that the contrary view, the only view which a mealy-
mouthed British nineteenth century admits as endurable,
amounts to the condemnation of nearly every great or
eminent literary work of past time, whatever the century
it belongs to, the country it comes from, the department
of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of merit it
possesses. Tenth, second, or first century before Christ,
—first, eighth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth,
or even eighteenth century A.D.—it is still the same: no
book whose subject-matter admits as possible of an impro-
priety according to current notions can be depended upon
to fail of containing such impropriety,—can, if those notions
are accepted as the canon, be placed with a sense of se-
curity in the hands of girls and youths, or read aloud to

PREFATORY NOTICE.

women; and this holds good just as much of severely
moral or plainly descriptive as of avowedly playful, know-
ing, or licentious books. For my part, I am far from
thinking that earlier state of literature, and the public
feeling from which it sprang, the wrong ones—and our
present condition the only right one. Equally far there-
fore am I from indignantly condemning Whitman for
every startling allusion or expression which he has ad-
mitted into his book, and which I, from motives of policy,
have excluded from this selection; except, indeed, that I
think many of his tabooed passages are extremely raw and
ugly on the ground of poetic or literary art, whatever
aspect they may bear in morals. I have been rigid in
exclusion, because it appears to me highly desirable that
a fair verdict on Whitman should now be pronounced in
England on poetic grounds alone; and because it was
clearly impossible that the book, with its audacities of
topic and of expression included, should run the same
chance of justice, and of circulation through refined minds
and hands, which may possibly be accorded to it after the
rejection of all such peccant poems. As already intimated,
I have not in a single instance excised any parts of
poems: to do so would have been, I conceive, no less
wrongful towards the illustrious American than repug-
nant, and indeed unendurable, to myself, who aspire to no
Bowdlerian honours. The consequence is that the reader
loses in toto several important poems, and some extremely

PREFATORY NOTICE.

fine ones—notably the one previously alluded to, of quite
exceptional value and excellence, entitled Walt Whit-
man. I sacrifice them grudgingly; and yet willingly, be-
cause I believe this to be the only thing to do with due
regard to the one reasonable object which a selection can
subserve—that of paving the way towards the issue and
unprejudiced reception of a complete edition of the poems
in England. For the benefit of misconstructionsists, let me
add in distinct terms that, in respect of morals and pro-
priety, I neither admire nor approve the incriminated
passages in Whitman’s poems, but on the contrary con-
sider that most of them would be much better away; and,
in respect of art, I doubt whether even one of them de-
serves to be retained in the exact phraseology it at present
exhibits. This, however, does not amount to saying that
Whitman is a vile man, or a corrupt or corrupting writer:
he is none of these.

The only division of his poems into selections, made by
Whitman himself, has been noted above: Leaves of
Grass, Songs before Parting, supplementary to the pre-
ceeding, and Drum Taps, with their Sequel. The peculiar
title, Leaves of Grass, has become almost inseparable
from the name of Whitman; it seems to express with
some aptness the simplicity, universality, and spontaneity,
of the poems to which it is applied. Songs before
Parting may indicate that these compositions close
Whitman’s poetic roll. Drum Taps are, of course,

PREFATORY NOTICE.

songs of the Civil War, and their Sequel is mainly on
the same theme: the chief person in this last section being
the one on the death of Lincoln. These titles all apply to
fully arranged series of compositions. The present volume
is not in the same sense a fully arranged series, but a
selection; and the relation of the poems inter se appears
to me to depend on altered conditions, which, however
narrowed they are, it may be as well frankly to recognize
in practice. I have therefore redistributed the poems (a
latitude of action which I trust the author may not object
to), bringing together those whose subject-matter seems to
warrant it, however far separated they may possibly be in
the original volume. At the same time, I have retained
some characteristic terms used by Whitman himself, and
have named my sections respectively—

1. Chants Democratic (poems of democracy).

2. Drum Taps (war songs).

3. Walt Whitman (personal poems).

4. Leaves of Grass (unclassified poems).

5. Songs of Parting (missives).

The first thee designations explain themselves. The
fourth, Leaves of Grass, is not so specially applicable
to the particular poems of that selection here as I should
have liked it to be; but I could not consent to drop
this typical name. The Songs of Parting, my fifth section,
are compositions in which the poet expresses his own

PREFATORY NOTICE.

sentiment regarding his works, in which he forecasts their
future, or consigns them to the reader’s consideration.
It deserves mention that, in the copy of Whitman’s last
American edition revised by his own hand as previously
noticed, the series termed Songs of Parting has been
recast, and made to consist of poems of the same character
as those included in my section No. 5.

Comparatively few of Whitman’s poems have been en-
dowed by himself with titles so properly called. Most of
them are merely headed with the opening words of the
poems themselves—as "I was looking a long while;" "To
get betimes in Boston Town;" "When lilacs last in the
door-yard bloomed;" and so on. It seems to me that in a
selection such a lengthy and circuitous method of identi-
fying the poems is not desirable: I should wish them to
be remembered by brief, repeatable, and significant titles.
I have therefore supplied titles of my own to such pieces
as bear none in the original edition: wherever a real title
appears in that edition, I have retained it.

With these remarks I commend to the English reader
the ensuing selection from a writer whom I sincerely be-
lieve to be, whatever his faults, of the order of great

poets, and by no means of pretty good ones. I would
urge the reader not to ask himself, and not to return any
answer to the questions, whether or not this poet is like
other poets—whether or not the particular application of
rules of art which is found to hold good in the works

PREFATORY NOTICE.

of those others, and to constitute a part of their excellence,
can be traced also in Whitman. Let the questions rather
be—Is he powerful? Is he American? Is he new? Is
he rousing? Does he feel and make me feel? I enter-
tain no doubt as to the response which in due course of
time will be returned to these questions and such as
these, in America, in England, and elsewhere—or to the
further question, "Is Whitman then indeed a true and a
great poet?" Lincoln’s verdict bespeaks the ultimate
decision upon him, in his books as in his habit as he lives—
"Well, he looks like a man."

Walt Whitman occupies at the present moment a
unique position on the globe, and one which, even in
past time, can have been occupied by only an infinitesi-
mally small number of men. He is the one man who enter-
tains and professes respecting himself the grave conviction
that he is the actual and prospective founder of a new
poetic literature, and a great one—a literature proportional
to the material vastness and the unmeasured destinies of
America: he believes that the Columbus of the continent
or the Washington of the States was not more truly than
himself in the future a founder and upbuilder of this
America. Surely a sublime conviction, and expressed
more than once in magnificent words—none more so than
the lines beginning

Come, I will make this continent indissoluble.*

* See the poem headed Love of Comrades, p. 391.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

Were the idea untrue, it would still be a glorious dream,
which a man of genius might be content to live in and
die for: but is it untrue? Is it not, on the contrary,
true, if not absolutely, yet with a most genuine and sub-
stantial approximation? I believe it is thus true. I
believe that Whitman is one of the huge, as yet mainly
unrecognised, forces of our time; privileged to evoke, in
a country hitherto still asking for its poet, a fresh, athletic,
and American poetry, and predestined to be traced up to
by generation after generation of believing and ardent—
let us hope not servile—disciples.

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Shelley, who knew what he was talking about when poetry
was the subject, has said it, and with a profundity of
truth. Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out
for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will
one day be potential or magisterial wherever the English
language is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of
the earth; and, in his own American hemisphere, the
uttermost avatars of democracy will confess him not more
their announcer than their inspirer.

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 man-
ners and literature while the life which served its require-
ments 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something
in the doings of man that corresponds with the broad-
cast 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 particu-
lars 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 rug-
gedness 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 inde-
corous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 suf-
fice 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 of 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 conti-
nents 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 embou-
chure 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 limetree 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 redshouldered-hawk 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 settle-
ments north or south—the rapid stature and muscle—the

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and
formation of the constitution—the union always sur-
rounded by blatherers, and always calm and impreg-
nable—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
gestation 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 work-
women—the general ardour and friendliness and enter-
prise—the perfect equality of the female with the male—
the large amativeness—the fluid movement of the popu-
lation—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 northeast and of the northwest and
southwest—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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 need 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 equalizer 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, immor-
tality—federal, state or municipal government, mar-
riage, health, free-trade, intertravel by land and sea—

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 exclu-
siveness, 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 weak-
ness or sin.

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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 mar-
vellous? 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—pro-
bably 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,

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 chest-
nuts 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 great-
nesses 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 pre-
vail. 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 per-
suades 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 pro-
portions. 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 pre-
cision 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.

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 realize 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 pin-
nacles 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 moralize or make applications of morals,—he
knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 un-
common. 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 con-
template 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 sooth, 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 com-
position 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 forever and forever who contributes the
greatest original practical example. The cleanest ex-
pression 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 dis-
memberments, 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 any thing 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 afflu-
ent 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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, his-
torian, 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 sent 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. Cleav-
ing 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 re-
sumed—they are neither modest nor immodest. The
whole theory of the special and supernatural, and all that

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 con-
cerns 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 happi-
ness 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 after-
ward—or less than vast stretches of time, or the slow

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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
characterize 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 indispensible. 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
awhile, and, though they neither speak nor advise, you

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 com-
munion 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 realize the true Ameri-
can character, but do not yet*—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 defer-
ence 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—

* This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here
reproduced verbatim from the American edition.

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from
that part of the earth.

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 strata-
gems 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 realize 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

and maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich
and large. These American states, strong and healthy
and accomplished, shall receive no pleasure from viola-
tions 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 beau-
tiful without ornament. Exaggerations will be rev-
enged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous chil-
dren 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 can-
dour! 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 subter-
fuge 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 fœtid 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 re-
formation 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 destructive-

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

ness 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 moneymaking, 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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
civilization and forethought; blotching the surface and
system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moisten-
ing 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 realized and returned, and that
returned in further performances, and they returned again.
Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be any-
thing 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 forever. 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.

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 wander-
ing 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 inure now, and will
inure always, to the identities from which they sprung

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 coming 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 pos-
sible 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 real 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 or avoids death.

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet
is to-day. If he does not flood himself with the imme-
diate 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 swim-
ming 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 representa-
tion 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 dis-
covery 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 andthe 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 realize and be content and
full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring
—he brings neither cessation or 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 fear-
lessly 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

done. They may wait awhile—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 inspi-
ration 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,

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 free-
woman’s heart after that which passes by, or this built to
remain. Is it uniform with my country? Are its dis-
posals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the
evergrowing 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 ac-
knowledgement, and set slavery at nought for life and

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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 chil-
dren? 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 com-
posure 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

PREFACE TO LEAVES OF GRASS.

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.
Meantime, dear friend, Farewell, Walt Whitman

Meantime, dear friend, Farewell, Walt Whitman

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.

I.
STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok,* where I was

born,
Well-begotten, and raised by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands—lover of populous pavements;
Dweller in Mannahatta,† 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;

* Paumanok is the native name of Long Island, State of New
York. It presents a fish-like shape on the map.
† Mannahatta, or Manahattan, is (as many readers will know)
New York.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Aware of the buffalo herds, grazing the plains—the hirsute

and strong-breasted bull;
Of earth, 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!
Underfoot the divine soil—overhead the sun.

See, revolving, the globe;
The ancestor-continents, away, grouped together;
The present and future continents, north and south, with

the isthmus between.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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,*
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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

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;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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!
Forever and forever—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 mor-

tality,
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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 worshiped 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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The greatness of Love and Democracy—and the greatness

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,
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,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 briers, 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

13.

Democracy!
Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and

joyfully singing.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

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 pre-

sent—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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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, sub-

stances, 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,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 impres-

sion, 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

Toward the male of the States, and toward the female

of the States,
Live words—words to the lands.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 the 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 northwest Columbia winds, and where

the southwest 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 Caro-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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—dwell-

ing 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*—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

*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.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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,*

or of the Narragansett Bay State, or of the Empire

State; †
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same—yet wel-

coming 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?

* New Hampshire † New York State

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

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!

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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.

___________

AMERICAN FEUILLAGE.
AMERICA always!
Always our old 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*—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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 conti-

nent 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;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 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 colored flowers and berries, enve-

loping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and

low, noiselessly waved by the wind;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The camp of Georgia wagoners, just after dark—the

supper-fires, and the cooking and eating by whites

and negroes,
Thirty or forty great wagons—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 wind-

lasses 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 night-fall, in their

boats, under shelter of high banks,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 stanch California friendship—the

sweet air—the graves one, in passing, meets, soli-

tary, 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 Dila-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

—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, Pauma-

nok’s fields,
Me, observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butter-

flies shuffling between each other, ascending high

in the air;
The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects—the fall-

traveler 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 road-side

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The city wharf—Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charles-

ton, 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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Otherways, there, atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the

Rio Grande, the Nueces, the Brazos, the Tom-

bigbee, the Red River, the Saskatchawan or the

Osage, I with the spring waters laughing and

skipping and running;
Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Pau-

manok, 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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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, war, 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

___________

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;)

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 combi-

nations—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 suit-

able to them closed?

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 ap-

proach?
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 colonizes

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 inter-

links 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;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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, ad-

___________

FLUX.

OF these years I sing,
How they pass through convulsed pains, as through

parturitions;
How America illustrates birth, gigantic youth, the pro-

mise, the sure fulfilment, despite of people—Illus-

trates evil as well as good;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed,

caste, myths, obedience, compulsion, and to infi-

delity;
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, willful, 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.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

TO WORKING-MEN.

I.
COME closer to me;
Push close, my lovers, and take the best I possess;
Yield closer and closer, and give me the best you posses.

This is unfinished business with me—How is it with you?
(I was chilled with the cold types, cylinder, wet paper

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

2.

This is the poem of occupations;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 dis-

played 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;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 out-

lawed 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

Why, what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought of yourself less?
Is it you that thought the President greater than you?
Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser

Because you are greasy or pimpled, or that you was once

drunk, or a theif,
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, un-

heard, untouchable and untouching;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 per-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 specula-

tion, or bon-mot, or reconnoissance,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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 cer-

tain 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 out-stretching 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 forever,
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 har-

monious combinations, and the fluids of the air, as

subjects for the savans?
Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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

We consider bibles and religious 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.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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, who-

ever 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

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

List close, my scholars dear!
All doctrines, all politics and civilizations, 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 re-

minded by the instruments;
It is not the violins and the cornets—it is not the oboe

nor the beating drums, nor the score or the bary-

tone 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.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

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.

House-building, measuring, sawing the boards;
Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-

roofing, shingle-dressing,
Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, ferrying, flagging

of side-walks by flaggers,
The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-

kiln and brick-kiln,
Coal-mines, and all that is down there,—the lamps in the

darkness, echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast

native thoughts looking through smutched faces,
Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains, or by the river-

banks—men around feeling the melt with huge

crowbars—lumps of ore, the due combining of ore,

limestone, coal—the blast-furnace and the puddling-

furnace, the loup-lump at the bottom of the melt at

last—the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars of pig-iron,

the strong, clean-shaped T-rail for railroads;
Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house,

steam-saws, the great mills and factories;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Stone-cutting, shapely trimmings for façades, or window

or door lintels—the mallet, the tooth-chisel, the

jib to protect the thumb,
Oakum, the oakum-chisel, the caulking-iron—the kettle

of boiling vault-cement, and the fire under the

kettle,
The cotton-bale, the stevedore’s hook, the saw and buck

of the sawyer, the mould of the moulder, the

working-knife of the butcher, the ice-saw, and all

the work with ice,
The implements for daguerreotyping—the tools of the

rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker,
Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mâché, colours, brushes,

brush-making, glazier’s implements,
The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner’s ornaments,

the decanter and glasses, the shears and flat-iron,
The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart

measure, the counter and stool, the writing-pen

of quill or metal—the making of all sorts of edged

tools,
The brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, every thing that

is done by brewers, also by wine-makers, also

vinegar-makers,
Leather-dressing, coach-making,

boiler-making, rope-

twisting, distilling, sign-painting, lime-burning,

cotton-picking—electro-plating, electrotyping,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Stave-machines, planing-machines, reaping-machines,

ploughing-machines, thrashing-machines, steam

wagons,
The cart of the carman, the omnibus, the ponderous

dray;
Pyrotechny, letting off coloured fire-works at night, fancy

figures and jets,
Beef on the butcher’s stall, the slaughter-house of the

butcher, the butcher in his killing-clothes,
The pens of live pork, the killing-hammer, the hog-hook,

the scalder’s tub, gutting, the cutter’s cleaver, the

packer’s maul, and the plenteous winter-work of

pork-packing,
Flour-works, grinding of wheat, rye, maize, rice—the

barrels and the half and quarter barrels, the loaded

barges, the high piles on wharves and levees,
The men, and the work of the men, on railroads, coasters,

fish-boats, canals;
The daily routine of your own or any man’s life—the

shop, yard, store, or factory;
These shows all near you by day and night—workmen!

whoever you are, your daily life!
In that and them the heft of the heaviest—in them far

more than you estimated, and far less also;
In them realities for you and me—in them poems for you

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

In them, not yourself—you and your soul enclose all

things, regardless of estimation;
In them the development good—in them, all themes and

I do not affirm what you see beyond is futile—I do not

advise you to stop;
I do not say leadings you thought great are not great;
But I say that none lead to greater than these lead to.

7.

Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best, or as good

as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest,

lovingest;
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place

—not for another hour, but this hour;
Man in the first you see or touch—always in friend,

brother, nighest neighbor—Woman in mother,

sister, wife;
The popular tastes and employments taking precedence in

poems or any where,
You workwomen and workmen of these States having your

own divine and strong life,
And all else giving place to men and women like you.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE.

I.
WEAPON, shapely, naked, wan,
Head from the mother’s bowels drawn!
Wooded flesh and metal bone! limb only one, and lip only

one!
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown! helve produced from a

little seed sown!
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be leaned, and to lean on.

Strong shapes, and attributes of strong shapes—masculine

trades, sights and sounds;
Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music;
Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of

the great organ.

2.
Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind;
Welcome are lands of pine and oak;
Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Welcome are lands of gold;
Welcome are lands of wheat and maize—welcome those of

the grape;
Welcome are lands of sugar and rice;
Welcome the cotton-lands—welcome those of the white

potato and sweet potato;
Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies;
Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings;
Welcome the measureless grazing-lands—welcome the

teeming soil of orchards, flax, honey, hemp;
Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands;
Lands rich as lands of gold, or wheat and fruit lands;
Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores;
Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc;
LANDS OF IRON! lands of the make of the axe!

3.
The log at the wood-pile, the axe supported by it;
The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space

cleared for a garden,
The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves, after

the storm is lulled,
The wailing and moaning at intervals, the thought of the

sea,
The thought of ships struck in the storm, and put on their

beam-ends, and the cutting away of masts;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashioned houses

and barns;
The remembered print or narrative, the voyage at a ven-

ture of men, families, goods,
The disembarkation, the founding of a new city,
The voyage of those who sought a New England and found

it—the outset anywhere,
The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa,

Willamette,
The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddle-

bags;
The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons,
The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men, with their clear

untrimmed faces,
The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely

on themselves,
The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the

boundless impatience of restraint,
The loose drift of character, the inkling through random

types, the solidification;
The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard

schooners and sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,
Lumbermen in their winter camp, day-break in the woods,

stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional

snapping,
The glad clear sound of one’s own voice, the merry song,

the natural life of the woods, the strong day’s work,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the

talk, the bed of hemlock boughs, and the bear-

skin;
—The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,
The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,
The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places,

laying them regular,
Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises, according

as they were prepared,
The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the

men, their curved limbs,
Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins,

holding on by posts and braces,
The hooked arm over the plate, the other arm wielding

the axe,
The floor-men forcing the planks close, to be nailed,
Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the

bearers,
The echoes resounding through the vacant building;
The huge store-house carried up in the city, well under

way,
The six framing men, two in the middle, and two at each

end, carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy

stick for a cross-beam,
The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right

hands, rapidly laying the long side-wall, two hun-

dred feet from front to rear,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of

the trowels striking the bricks,
The bricks, one after another, each laid so workmanlike

in its place, and set with a knock of the trowel-

handle,
The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards,

and the steady replenishing by the hod-men;
—Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of

well-grown apprentices,
The swing of their axes on the square-hewed log, shaping

it toward the shape of a mast,
The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into

the pine,
The butter-coloured chips flying off in great flakes and

slivers,
The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in

easy costumes;
The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads,

floats, stays against the sea;
—The city fireman—the fire that suddenly bursts forth in

the close-packed square,
The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble step-

ping and daring,
The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling

in line, the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,
The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets—the bringing to

bear of the hooks and ladders, and their execution,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The crash and cut-away of connecting wood-work, or

through floors, if the fire smoulders under them,
The crowd with their lit faces, watching—the glare and

dense shadows;
—The forger at his forge-furnace, and the user of iron

after him,
The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and

temperer,
The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel, and

trying the edge with his thumb,
The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in

the socket;
The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users

also,
The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engi-

neers,
The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice,
The Roman lictors preceding the consuls,
The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,
The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted

head,
The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of

friend and foe thither,
The siege of revolted lieges determined for liberty,
The summons to surrender, the battering at castle-gates,

the truce and parley;
The sack of an old city in its time,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The bursting-in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously

and disorderly,
Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,
Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of

women in the gripe of brigands,
Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old

persons despairing,
The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,
The list of all executive deeds and words, just or unjust,
The power of personality, just or unjust.

4.
Muscle and pluck forever!
What invigorates life invigorates death,
And the dead advance as much as the living advance,
And the future is no more uncertain than the present,
And the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as

much as the delicatesse of the earth and of man,
And nothing endures but personal qualities.

What do you think endures?
Do you think a great city endures?
Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared consti-

tution? or the best built steamships?
Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d’œuvres of en-

gineering, forts, armaments?

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Away! these are not to be cherished for themselves;
They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play

for them;
The show passes, all does well enough of course,
All does very well till one flash of defiance.

A great city is that which has the greatest man or

woman;
If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the

5.
The place where the great city stands is not the place of

stretched wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of

produce,
Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new comers, or the

anchor-lifters of the departing,
Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings, or shops

selling goods from the rest of the earth,
Nor the place of the best libraries and schools—nor the

place where money is plentiest,
Nor the place of the most numerous population.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators

and bards;
Where the city stands that is beloved by these, and loves

them in return and understands them;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common

words and deeds;
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place;
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws;
Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases;
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending

audacity of elected persons;
Where fierce men and women pour forth, as the sea to the

whistle of death pours its sweeping and unripped

waves;
Where outside authority enters always after the precedence

of inside authority;
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal—and

President, Mayor, Governor, and what not, are

agents for pay;
Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and

to depend on themselves;
Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs;
Where speculations on the Soul are encouraged;
Where women walk in public processions in the streets,

the same as the men;
Where they enter the public assembly and take places the

same as the men;
Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands;
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands;
Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands;
Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,—
There the great city stands.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

6.

How beggarly appear arguments, before a defiant deed!
How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before

a man’s or woman’s look!

All waits, or goes by default, till a strong being appears;
A strong being is the proof of the race, and of the ability

of the universe;
When he or she appears, materials are overawed,
The dispute on the Soul stops,
The old customs and phrases are confronted, turned back,

What is your money-making now? What can it do now?
What is your respectability now?
What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-

books, now?
Where are your jibes of being now?
Where are your cavils about the Soul now?

Was that your best? Were those your vast and solid?
Riches, opinions, politics, institutions, to part obediently

from the path of one man or woman!
The centuries, and all authority, to be trod under the

foot-soles of one man or woman!

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

7.
A sterile landscape covers the ore—there is as good as the

best, for all the forbidding appearance;
There is the mine, there are the miners;
The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplished; the

hammersmen are at hand with their tongs and

hammers;
What always served and always serves is at hand.

Than this nothing has better served—it has served all:
Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and

long ere the Greek:
Served in building the buildings that last longer than any;
Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient Hin-

dostanee;
Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi—served those

whose relics remain in Central America;
Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn

pillars, and the druids;
Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the snow-

covered hills of Scandinavia;
Served those who, time out of mind, made on the granite

walls rough sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships,

ocean-waves;
Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths—served

the pastoral tribes and nomads;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Served the long long distant Kelt—served the hardy

pirates of the Baltic;
Served, before any of those, the venerable and harmless

men of Ethiopia;
Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure,

and the making of those for war;
Served all great works on land and all great works on the

sea;
For the mediæval ages, and before the mediæval ages;
Served not the living only, then as now, but served the

8.
I see the European headsman;
He stands masked, clothed in red, with huge legs, and

strong naked arms,
And leans on a ponderous axe.

Whom have you slaughtered lately, European headsman?
Whose is that blood upon you, so wet and sticky?

I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs;
I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,
Ghosts of dead lords, uncrowned ladies, impeached

ministers, rejected kings,
Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see those who in any land have died for the good cause;
The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run

out;
(Mind you, O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never

I see the blood washed entirely away from the axe;
Both blade and helve are clean;
They spirt no more the blood of European nobles—they

clasp no more the necks of queens.

I see the headsman withdraw and become useless;
I see the scaffold untrodden and mouldy—I see no longer

any axe upon it;
I see the mighty and friendly emblem of the power of my

own race—the newest, largest race.

9.
America! I do not vaunt my love for you;
I have what I have.

The axe leaps!
The solid forest gives fluid utterances;
They tumble forth, they rise and form,
Hut, tent, landing, survey,
Flai plough, pick, crowbar, spade,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, lamb, lath, panel, gable,
Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition house,

library,
Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, shutter, turret,

porch,
Hoe, rake, pitch-fork, pencil, wagon, staff, saw, jack-plane,

mallet, wedge, rounce,
Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor,
Work-box, chest, stringed instrument, boat, frame, and

what not,
Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States,
Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans, or

for the poor or sick,
Manhattan steamboats and clippers, taking the measure of

The shapes arise!
Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users, and

all that neighbours them,
Cutters down of wood, and haulers of it to the Penobscot

or Kennebec,
Dwellers in cabins among the Californian mountains, or by

the little lakes, or on the Columbia,
Dwellers south on the banks of the Gila or Rio Grande

—friendly gatherings, the characters and fun,
Dwellers up north in Minnesota and by the Yellowstone

river—dwellers on coasts and off coasts,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Seal-fishers, whalers, arctic seamen breaking passages

through the ice.

The shapes arise!
Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets;
Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads;
Shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders,

arches;
Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows, lake craft, river

The shapes arise!
Ship-yards and dry-docks along the Eastern and Western

Seas, and in many a bay and by-place,
The live-oak kelsons, the pine planks, the spars, the hack-

matack-roots for knees,
The ships themselves on their ways, the tiers of scaffolds,

the workmen busy outside and inside,
The tools lying around, the great auger and little auger,

the adze, bolt, line, square, gouge, and bead-plane.

10.
The shapes arise!
The shape measured, sawed, jacked, joined, stained,
The coffin-shape for the dead to lie within in his shroud;
The shape got out in posts, in the bedstead posts, in the

posts of the bride’s bed;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The shape of the little trough, the shape of the rockers

beneath, the shape of the babe’s cradle;
The shape of the floor-planks, the floor-planks for dancers’

feet;
The shape of the planks of the family home, the home of

the friendly parents and children,
The shape of the roof of the home of the happy young

man and woman, the roof over the well-married

young man and woman,
The roof over the supper joyously cooked by the chaste

wife, and joyously eaten by the chaste husband,

content after his day’s work.

The shapes arise!
The shape of the prisoner’s place in the court-room, and

of him or her seated in the place;
The shape of the liquor-bar leaned against by the young

rum-drinker and the old rum-drinker;
The shape of the shamed and angry stairs trod by sneak-

ing footsteps;
The shape of the sly settee, and the adulterous unwhole-

some couple;
The shape of the gambling-board with its devilish win-

nings and losings;
The shape of the step-ladder for the convicted and sen-

tenced murderer, the murderer with haggard face

and pinioned arms,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The sheriff at hand with his deputies, the silent and

white-lipped crowd, the sickening dangling of the

The shapes arise!
Shapes of doors giving many exits and entrances;
The door passing the dissevered friend, flushed and in

haste;
The door that admits good news and bad news;
The door whence the son left home, confident and puffed

up;
The door he entered again from a long and scandalous

absence, diseased, broken down, without innocence,

11.
Her shape arises,
She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever;
The gross and soiled she moves among do not make her

gross and soiled;
She knows the thoughts as she passes—nothing is con-

cealed from her;
She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor;
She is the best beloved—it is without exception—she has

no reason to fear and she does not fear;
Oaths, quarrels, hiccupped songs, smutty expressions, are

idle to her as she passes;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

She is silent—she is possessed of herself—they do not

offend her;
She receives them as the laws of nature receive them—

she is strong,
She too is a law of nature—there is no law stronger than

12.
The main shapes arise!
Shapes of Democracy, total result of centuries;
Shapes, ever projecting other shapes;
Shapes of a hundred Free States, begetting another

hundred;
Shapes of turbulent manly cities;
Shapes of the women fit for these States;
Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
Shapes bracing the earth, and braced with the whole

___________

ANTECEDENTS.

I.

WITH antecedents;
With my fathers and mothers, and the accumu-

lations of past ages:

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here,

as I am;
With Egypt, India, Phœnicia, Greece and Rome;
With the Kelt, the Scandinavian, the Alb, and the Saxon;
With antique maritime ventures,—with laws, artizanship,

wars, and journeys;
With the poet, the skald, the saga, the myth, and the oracle;
With the sale of slaves—with enthusiasts—with the trou-

badour, the crusader, and the monk;
With those old continents whence we have come to this

new continent;
With the fading kingdoms and kings over there;
With the fading religions and priests;
With the small shores we look back to from our own large

and present shores;
With countless years drawing themselves onward, and

arrived at these years;
You and Me arrived—America arrived, and making this

year;
This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come.

2.

O but it is not the years—it is I—it is You;
We touch all laws, and tally all antecedents;
We are the skald, the oracle, the monk and the knight—

we easily include them, and more;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

We stand amid time, beginningless and endless—we stand

amid evil and good;
All swings around us—there is as much darkness as

light;
The very sun swings itself and its system of planets

around us:
Its sun, and its again, all swing around us.

3.

As for me, (torn, stormy, even as I, amid these vehement

days;)
I have the idea of all, and am all, and believe in all;
I believe materialism is true, and spiritualism is true—I

reject no part.

Have I forgotten any part?
Come to me, whoever and whatever, till I give you re-

I respect Assyria, China, Teutonia, and the Hebrews;
I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god;
I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true,

without exception;
I assert that all past days were what they should have

been;
And that they could no-how have been better than they

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

And that to-day is what it should be, and that America

is,
And that to-day and America could no-how be better

4.

In the name of these States, and in your and my name,

the Past,
And in the name of these States, and in your and my

name, the Present time.

I know that the past was great, and the future will be

great,
And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present

time,
For the sake of him I typify—for the common average

man’s sake—your sake, if you are he;
And that where I am, or you are, this present day, there

is the centre of all days, all races,
And there is the meaning, to us, of all that has ever come

of races and days, or ever will come.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

SALUT AU MONDE!

I.

O TAKE my hand, Walt Whitman!
Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
Such joined unended links, each hooked to the next!
Each answering all—each sharing the earth with all.

What widens within you, Walt Whitman?
What waves and soils exuding?
What climes? what persons and cities are here?
Who are the infants? some playing, some slumbering?
Who are the girls? who are the married women?
Who are the three old men going slowly with their arms

about each others’ necks?
What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these?
What are the mountains called that rise so high in the

mists?
What myriads of dwellings are they, filled with dwellers?

2.

Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east—America is provided

for in the west;
Banding the bulge of the earth winds the hot equator,
Curiously north and south turn the axis-ends,
Within me is the longest day—the sun wheels in slanting

rings—it does not set for months.
Stretched in due time within me the midnight sun just

rises above the horizon, and sinks again;
Within me zones, seas, cataracts, plants, volcanoes, groups,
Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands.

3.

What do you hear Walt Whitman?

I hear the workman singing, and the farmer’s wife sing-

ing;
I hear in the distance the sounds of children, and of

animals early in the day;
I hear the quick rifle-cracks from the riflemen of East Ten-

nessee and Kentucky, hunting on hills;
I hear emulous shouts of Australians, pursuing the wild

horse;
I hear the Spanish dance, with castanets, in the chestnut

shade, to the rebeck and guitar;
I hear continual echoes from the Thames;
I hear fierce French liberty songs;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of

old poems;
I hear the Virginian plantation chorus of negroes, of a

harvest night, in the glare of pine knots;
I hear the strong barytone of the ’long-shore-men of

Mannahatta;
I hear the stevedores unlading the cargoes, and singing;
I hear the screams of the water-fowl of solitary north-

west lakes;
I hear the rustling patterning of locusts, as they strike the

grain and grass with the showers of their terrible

clouds;
I hear the Coptic refrain, toward sundown, pensively

falling on the breast of the black venerable vast

mother, the Nile;
I hear the bugles of raft-tenders on the streams of Canada;
I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of

the mule;
I hear the Arab muezzin, calling from the top of the

mosque;
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches

—I hear the responsive base and soprano;
I hear the wail of utter despair of the white-haired Irish

grand-parents, when they learn the death of their

grandson;
I hear the cry of the Cossack, and the sailor’s voice, putting

to sea at Okotsk;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle, as the slaves march

on—as the husky gangs pass on by twos and

threes, fastened together with wrist-chains and

ankle-chains;
I hear the entreaties of women tied up for punishment—

I hear the sibilant whisk of thongs through the air;
I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms;
I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong

legends of the Romans;
I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the

beautiful God, the Christ;
I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves,

wars, adages, transmitted safely to this day from

poets who wrote three thousand years ago.

4.

What do you see, Walt Whitman?
Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute

I see a great round wonder rolling through the air:
I see diminute farms, hamlets, ruins, grave-yards, jails,

factories, palaces, hovels, huts of barbarians, tents

of nomads, upon the surface;
I see the shaded part on one side, where the sleepers are

sleeping—and the sun-lit part on the other side,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see the curious silent change of the light and shade,
I see distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants of

them as my land is to me.

I see plenteous waters;
I see mountain-peaks—I see the sierras of Andes and

Alleghanies, where they range;
I see plainly the Himilayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, Ghauts;
I see the Rocky Mountains, and the Peak of Winds;
I see the Styrian Alps, and the Karnac Alps;
I see the Pyrenees, Balks, Carpathians—and to the north

the Dofrafields, and off at sea Mount Hecla;
I see Vesuvius and Etna—I see the Anahuacs;
I see the Mountains of the Moon, and the Snow Mountains,

and the Red Mountains of Madagascar;
I see the Vermont hills, and the long string of Cordilleras;
I see the vast deserts of Western America;
I see the Lybian, Arabian, and Asiatic deserts;
I see huge dreadful Arctic and Antarctic icebergs;
I see the superior oceans and the inferior ones—the At-

lantic and Pacific, the sea of Mexico, the Brazilian

sea, and the sea of Peru,
The Japan waters, those of Hindostan, the China sea, and

the Gulf of Guinea,
The spread of the Baltic, Caspian, Bothnia, the British

shores, and the bay of Biscay,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The clear-sunned Mediterranean, and from one to another

of its islands,
The inland fresh-tasted seas of North America,
The White Sea, and the sea around Greenland.

I behold the mariners of the world;
Some are in storms—some in the night, with the watch on

the look-out;
Some drifting helplessly—some with contagious diseases.

I behold the sail and steam ships of the world, some in

clusters in port, some on their voyages;
Some double the Cape of Storms—some Cape Verde,—

others Cape Guardafui, Bon, or Bajadore;
Others Dondra Head—others pass the Straits of Sunda—

others Cape Lopatka—others Behring’s Straits;
Others Cape Horn—others sail the Gulf of Mexico, or along

Cuba or Hayti—others Hudson’s Bay or Baffin’s

Bay;
Others pass the straits of Dover—others enter the Wash—

others the Firth of Solway—others round Cape

Clear—others the Land’s End;
Others traverse the Zuyder Zee, or the Scheld;
Others add to the exits and entrances at Sandy Hook;
Others to the comers and goers at Gibraltar, or the Dar-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Others sternly push their way through the northern

winter-packs;
Others descend or ascend the Obi or the Lena:
Others the Niger or the Congo—others the Indus, the

Burampooter and Cambodia:
Others wait at the wharves of Manhattan, steamed up,

ready to start;
Wait, swift and swarthy, in the ports of Australia;
Wait at Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin, Marseilles, Lisbon,

Naples, Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux, the Hague,

Copenhagen;
Wait at Valparaiso, Rio Janeiro, Panama;
Wait at their moorings at Boston, Philadelphia, Balti-

more, Charleston, New Orleans, Galveston, San

5.

I see the tracks of the rail-roads of the earth;
I see them welding State to State, city to city, through

North America;
I see them in Great Britain, I see them in Europe;
I see them in Asia and in Africa.

I see the electric telegraphs of the earth;
I see the filaments of the news of the wars, deaths, losses,

gains, passions, of my race.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see the long river-stripes of the earth;
I see where the Mississippi flows—I see where the Columbia

flows;
I see the Great River, and the Falls of Niagara;
I see the Amazon and the Paraguay;
I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the

Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl;
I see where the Seine flows, and where the Loire, the

Rhone, and the Guadalquiver flow;
I see the windings of the Volga, the Dnieper, the Oder;
I see the Tuscan going down the Arno, and the Venetian

along the Po;
I see the Greek seaman sailing out of Egina bay.

6.

I see the site of the old empire of Assyria, and that of

Persia, and that of India;
I see the falling of the Ganges over the high rim of

I see the place of the idea of the Deity incarnated by

avatars in human forms;
I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth—

oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, lamas, monks,

muftis, exhorters;
I see where druids walked the groves of Mona—I see the

mistletoe and vervain;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of Gods—I

see the old signifiers.

I see Christ once more eating the bread of his last supper,

in the midst of youths and old persons:
I see where the strong divine young man, the Hercules,

toiled faithfully and long, and then died;
I see the place of the innocent rich life and hapless fate of

the beautiful nocturnal son, the full-limbed Bac-

chus,
I see Kneph, blooming, drest in blue, with the crown of

feathers on his head;
I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to

the people, Do not weep for me,
This is not my true country, I have lived banished from

my true country—I now go back there,
I return to the celestial sphere, where every one goes in his

7.

I see the battle-fields of the earth—grass grows upon them,

and blossoms and corn;
I see the tracks of ancient and modern expeditions.

I see the nameless masonries, venerable messages of the

unknown events, heroes, records, of the earth.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see the places of the sagas;
I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts;
I see granite boulders and cliffs—I see green meadows

and lakes;
I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors;
I see them raised high with stones, by the marge of rest-

less oceans, that the dead men’s spirits, when they

wearied of their quiet graves, might rise up through

the mounds and gaze on the tossing billows, and

be refreshed by storms, immensity, liberty, action.

I see the steppes of Asia;
I see the tumuli of Mongolia—I see the tents of Kalmucks

and Baskirs;
I see the nomadic tribes, with herds of oxen and cows;
I see the table-lands notched with ravines—I see the

jungles and deserts;
I see the camel, the wild steed, the bustard, the fat-tailed

sheep, the antelope, and the burrowing wolf.

I see the highlands of Abyssinia;
I see flocks of goats feeding, and see the fig-tree, tama-

rind, date,
And see fields of teff-wheat and places of verdure

I see the Brazilian vaquero;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see the Bolivian ascending Mount Sorata;
I see the Wacho crossing the plains—I see the incom-

parable rider of horses with his lasso on his arm;
I see over the pampas the pursuit of wild cattle for their

8.

I see little and large sea-dots, some inhabited, some unin-

habited;
I see two boats with nets, lying off the shore of Pauma-

nok, quite still;
I see ten fishermen waiting—they discover now a thick

school of mossbonkers—they drop the joined sein-

ends in the water,
The boats separated—they diverge and row off, each on its

rounding course to the beach, enclosing the moss-

bonkers;
The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop

ashore,
Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats—others stand

negligently ankle-deep in the water, poised on

strong legs;
The boats are partly drawn up—the water slaps against

them;
On the sand, in heaps and winrows, well out from the

water, lie the green-backed spotted mossbonkers.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

9.

I see the despondent red man in the west, lingering about

the banks of Moingo, and about Lake Pepin;
He has heard the quail and beheld the honey-bee, and

sadly prepared to depart.

I see the regions of snow and ice;
I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn;
I see the seal-seeker in his boat, poising his lance;
I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge, drawn by

dogs;
I see the porpess-hunters—I see the whale-crews of the

South Pacific and the North Atlantic;
I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland—

I mark the long winters, and the isolation.

I see the cities of the earth, and make myself at random

a part of them;
I am a real Parisian;
I am a habitant of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Con-

stantinople;
I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne;
I am of London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Lime-

rick,
I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons, Brus-

sels, Berne, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin, Florence;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw—or northward in

Christiania or Stockholm—or in Siberian Irkutsk

—or in some street in Iceland;
I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them again.

10.

I see vapors exhaling from unexplored countries;
I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poisoned

splint, the fetich, and the obi.

I see African and Asiatic towns;
I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Mon-

rovia;
I see the swarms of Pekin, Canton, Benares, Delhi, Cal-

cutta, Yedo;
I see the Kruman in his hut, and the Dahoman and

Ashantee-man in their huts;
I see the Turk smoking opium in Aleppo;
I see the picturesque crowds at the fairs of Khiva, and

those of Herat;
I see Teheran—I see Muscat and Medina, and the inter-

vening sands—I see the caravans toiling onward;
I see Egypt and the Egyptians—I see the pyramids and

obelisks;
I look on chiselled histories, songs, philosophies, cut in

slabs of sand-stone, or on granite-blocks;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I see at Memphis mummy-pits, containing mummies, em-

balmed, swathed in linen cloth, lying there many

centuries;
I look on the fallen Theban, the large-balled eyes, the

side-drooping neck, the hands folded across the

I see the menials of the earth, labouring;
I see the prisoners in the prisons;
I see the defective human bodies of the earth;
I see the blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks,

lunatics;
I see the pirates, thieves, betrayers, murderers, slave-

makers of the earth;
I see the helpless infants, and the helpless old men and

I see male and female everywhere;
I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs;
I see the constructiveness of my race;
I see the results of the perseverance and industry of my

race;
I see ranks, colours, barbarisms, civilizations—I go among

them—I mix indiscriminately,
And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

11.

You, where you are!
You daughter or son of England!
You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ

in Russia!
You dim-descended, black, divine-souled African, large,

fine-headed, nobly-formed, superbly destined, on

equal terms with me!
You Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you

Prussian!
You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese!
You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France!
You Belge! you liberty-lover of the Netherlands!
You sturdy Austrian! you Lombard! Hun! Bohemian!

farmer of Styria!
You neighbour of the Danube!
You working-man of the Rhine, the Elbe, or the Weser!

you working-woman too!
You Sardinian! you Bavarian! Swabian! Saxon!

Wallachian! Bulgarian!
You citizen of Prague! Roman! Neapolitan! Greek!
You lithe matador in the arena at Seville!
You mountaineer living lawlessly on the Taurus or

Caucasus!
You Bokh horse-herd, watching your mares and stallions

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

You beautiful-bodied Persian, at full speed in the saddle

shooting arrows to the mark!
You Chinaman and Chinawoman of China! you Tartar of

Tartary!
You women of the earth subordinated at your tasks!
You Jew journeying in your old age through every risk,

to stand once on Syrian ground!
You other Jews waiting in all lands for your Messiah!
You thoughtful Armenian, pondering by some stream of

the Euphrates! you peering amid the ruins of

Nineveh! you ascending mount Ararat!
You foot-worn pilgrim welcoming the far-away sparkle of

the minarets of Mecca!
You sheiks along the stretch from Suez to Babelmandeb,

ruling your families and tribes!
You olive-grower tending your fruit on fields of Nazareth,

Damascus, or lake Tiberias!
You Thibet trader on the wide inland, or bargaining in

the shops of Lassa!
You Japanese man or woman! you liver in Madagascar,

Ceylon, Sumatra, Borneo!
All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia,

indifferent of place!
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of

the sea!
And you of centuries hence, when you listen to

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

And you, each and everywhere, whom I specify not, but

include just the same!
Health to you! Good will to you all—from me and

Each of us inevitable;
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right

upon the earth;
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth;
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

12.

You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly-haired

hordes!
You owned persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-

drops!
You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive

countenances of brutes!
I dare not refuse you—the scope of the world, and of time

and space, are upon me.

You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look

down upon, for all your glimmering language and

spirituality!
You low expiring aborigines of the hills of Utah, Oregon,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

You dwarfed Kamtschatkan, Greenlander, Lapp!
You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive lip,

groveling, seeking your food!
You Caffre, Berber, Soudanese!
You haggard, uncouth, untutored Bedowee!
You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kaubul, Cairo!
You bather bathing in the Ganges!
You benighted roamer of Amazonia! you Patagonian!

you Fejee-man!
You peon of Mexico! you slave of Carolina, Texas,

Tennessee!
I do not prefer others so very much before you either;
I do not say one word against you, away back there,

where you stand;
You will come forward in due time to my side.

My spirit has passed in compassion and determination

around the whole earth;
I have looked for equals and lovers, and found them ready

for me in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

13.

You vapors! I think I have risen with you, and moved

away to distant continents, and fallen down there,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I think I have blown with you, O winds;
O waters, I have fingered every shore with you.

I have run through what any river or strait of the globe

has run through;
I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas, and on

the high embedded rocks, to cry thence.

Salut au Monde!
What cities the light or warmth penetrates, I penetrate

those cities myself;
All islands to which birds wing their way, I wing my way

Toward all
I raise high the perpendicular hand—I make the signal,
To remain after me in sight forever,
For all the haunts and homes of men.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

A BROADWAY PAGEANT.

(RECEPTION OF THE JAPANESE EMBASSY, JUNE 16, 1860.)

I.

OVER sea, hither from Niphon,
Courteous, the Princes of Asia, swart-cheeked

princes,
First-comers, guests, two-sworded princes,
Lesson-giving princes, leaning back in their open ba-

rouches, bare-headed, impassive,
This day they ride through Manhattan.

2.

Libertad!
I do not know whether others behold what I behold,
In the procession along with the Princes of Asia, the

errand-bearers,
Bringing up the rear, hovering above, around, or in the

ranks marching;
But I will sing you a song of what I behold, Libertad.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

3.

When million-footed Manhattan, unpent, descends to its

pavements;
When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the

proud roar I love;
When the round-mouthed guns, out of the smoke and

smell I love, spit their salutes;
When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me—when

heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin

haze;
When, gorgeous, the countless straight stems, the forests

at the wharves, thicken with colours;
When every ship, richly dressed, carries her flag at the

peak;
When pennants trail, and street-festoons hang from the

windows;
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers

and foot-standers—when the mass is densest;
When the façades of the houses are alive with people—

when eyes gaze, riveted, tens of thousands at a

time;
When the guests from the islands advance—when the

pageant moves forward, visible;
When the summons is made—when the answer, that waited

thousands of years, answers;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I too, arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge

with the crowd, and gaze with them.

4.

Superb-faced Manhattan!
Comrade Americanos!—to us, then, at last, the Orient

To us, my city,
Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on

opposite sides—to walk in the space between,
To-day our Antipodes comes.

The Originatress comes,
The land of Paradise—land of the Caucasus—the nest of

birth,
The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race

of eld,
Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with

passion,
Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering

eyes,
The race of Brahma comes!

See, my cantabile! these, and more, are flashing to us

from the procession;

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine it moves

changing, before us.

Not the errand-bearing princes, nor the tanned Japanee

only;
Lithe and silent, the Hindoo appears—the whole Asiatic

continent itself appears—the Past, the dead,
The murky night-morning of wonder and fable, inscrutable,
The enveloped mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,
The North—the sweltering South—Assyria—the Hebrews

—the Ancient of ancients,
Vast desolated cities—the gliding Present—all of these,

and more, are in the pageant-procession.

Geography, the world, is in it;
The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast

beyond;
The coast you henceforth are facing—you Libertad! from

your Western golden shores;
The countries there, with their populations—the millions

en-masse, are curiously here;
The swarming market-places—the temples, with idols

ranged along the sides, or at the end—bonze,

brahmin, and lama;
The mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisher-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The singing-girl and the dancing-girl—the ecstatic person

—the divine Buddha;
The secluded Emperors—Confucius himself—the great

poets and heroes—the warriors, the castes, all,
Trooping up, crowding from all directions—from the Altay

mountains,
From Thibet—from the four winding and far-flowing

rivers of China,
From the Southern peninsulas, and the demi-continental

islands—from Malaysia;
These, and whatever belongs to them, palpable, show forth

to me, and are seized by me,
And I am seized by them, and friendlily held by them,
Till, as here, them all I chant, Libertad! for themselves

5.

For I too, raising my voice, join the ranks of this pageant;
I am the chanter—I chant aloud over the pageant;
I chant the world on my Western sea;
I chant, copious, the islands beyond, thick as stars in the

sky;
I chant the new empire, grander than any before—As in

a vision it comes to me;
I chant America, the Mistress—I chant a greater supre-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

I chant, projected, a thousand blooming cities yet, in time,

on those groups of sea-islands;
I chant my sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archi-

pelagoes;
I chant my stars and stripes fluttering in the wind;
I chant commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done

its work—races reborn, refreshed;
Lives, works, resumed—The object I know not—but the

old, the Asiatic, resumed, as it must be,
Commencing from this day, surrounded by the world.

And you, Libertad of the world!
You shall sit in the middle, well-poised, thousands of

years;
As to-day, from one side, the Princes of Asia come to

you;
As to-morrow, from the other side, the Queen of England

sends her eldest son to you.

The sign is reversing, the orb is enclosed,
The ring is circled, the journey is done;
The box-lid is but perceptibly opened—nevertheless the

perfume pours copiously out of the whole box.

6.

Young Libertad!
With the venerable Asia, the all-mother,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Be considerate with her, now and ever, hot Libertad—for

you are all;
Bend your proud neck to the long-off mother, now send-

ing messages over the archipelagoes to you:
Bend your proud neck low for once, young Libertad.

7.

Were the children straying westward so long? so wide the

tramping?
Were the precedent dim ages debouching westward from

Paradise so long?
Were the centuries steadily footing it that way, all the

while unknown, for you, for reasons?
They are justified—they are accomplished—they shall

now be turned the other way also, to travel toward

you thence;
They shall now also march obediently eastward, for your

sake, Libertad.

___________

OLD IRELAND

I.

FAR hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave, an ancient sorrowful mother,
Once a queen—now lean and tattered, seated on the

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Her old white hair drooping dishevelled round her

shoulders;
At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,
Long silent—she too long silent—mourning her shrouded

hope and heir;
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because

most full of love.

2.

Yet a word, ancient mother;
You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with

forehead between your knees;
O you need not sit there, veiled in your old white hair,

so dishevelled;
For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave;
It was an illusion—the heir, the son you love, was not

really dead;
The Lord is not dead—he is risen again, young and strong

in another country;
Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the

grave,
What you wept for was translated, passed from the

grave,
The winds favored, and the sea sailed it,
And now with rosy and new blood,
Moves to-day in a new country.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

BOSTON TOWN.

I.

TO get betimes in Boston town, I rose this morning

early;
Here’s a good place at the corner—I must stand and see

2.

Clear the way there, Jonathan!
Way for the President’s marshal! Way for the govern-

ment cannon!
Way for the Federal foot and dragoons—and the appari-

tions copiously tumbling.

I love to look on the stars and stripes—I hope the fifes will

play Yankee Doodle.

How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops!
Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through

3.

A fog follows—antiques of the same come limping,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged

Why this is indeed a show! It has called the dead out of

the earth!
The old graveyards of the hills have hurried to see!
Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear!
Cocked hats of mothy mould! crutches made of mist!
Arms in slings! old men leaning on young men’s shoulders!

What troubles you Yankee phantoms? What is all this

chattering of bare gums?
Does the ague convulse your limbs? Do you mistake

your crutches for fire-locks, and level them?

If you blind your eyes with tears, you will not see the

President’s marshal;
If you groan such groans, you might balk the government

For shame, old maniacs! Bring down those tossed arms,

and let your white hair be;
Here gape your great grandsons—their wives gaze at

them from the windows,
See how well-dressed, see how orderly they conduct them-

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Worse and worse! Can’t you stand it? Are you re-

treating?
Is this hour with the living too dead for you?

Retreat then! Pell-mell!
To your graves! Back! back to the hills, old limpers!
I do not think you belong here, anyhow.

4.

But there is one thing that belongs here—shall I tell you

what it is, gentlemen of Boston?

I will whisper it to the Mayor—He shall send a committee

to England;
They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart

to the royal vault—haste!
Dig out King George’s coffin, unwrap him quick from the

grave-clothes, box up his bones for a journey;
Find a swift Yankee clipper—here is freight for you,

black-bellied clipper,
Up with your anchor! shake out your sails! steer straight

toward Boston bay.

5.

Now call for the President’s marshal again, bring out the

government cannon,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another

procession, guard it with foot and dragoons.

This centre-piece for them!
Look, all orderly citizens! Look from the windows,

The committee open the box; set up the regal ribs; glue

those that will not stay;
Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top

You have got your revenge, old buster! The crown is

come to its own and more than its own.

6.

Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan—you are a

made man from this day;
You are mighty ’cute—and here is one of your bargains.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

FRANCE,

THE 18TH YEAR OF THESE STATES.*

I.

A GREAT year and place;
A harsh, discordant, natal scream out-sounding, to

touch the mother’s heart closer than any yet.

2.

I walked the shores of my Eastern Sea,
Heard over the waves the little voice,
Saw the divine infant, where she woke, mournfully wailing,

amid the roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of

falling buildings;
Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running,

—nor from the single corpses, nor those in heaps,

nor those borne away in the tumbrils;

* 1793-4. The great poet of Democracy is "not so shocked" at
the great European year of Democracy.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Was not so desperate at the battues of death—was not so

shocked at the repeated fusillades of the guns.

Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued

retribution?
Could I wish humanity different?
Could I wish the people made of wood and stone?
Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?

3.

O Liberty! O mate for me!
Here too the blaze, the bullet, and the axe, in reserve, to

fetch them out in case of need,
Here too, though long repressed, can never be destroyed;
Here too could rise at last, murdering and ecstatic;
Here too demanding full arrears of vengeance.

Hence I sign this salute over the sea,
And I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism,
But remember the little voice that I heard wailing—and

wait with perfect trust, no matter how long;
And from to-day, sad and cogent, I maintain the be-

queathed cause, as for all lands,
And I send these words to Paris with my love,
And I guess some chansonniers there will understand

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

For I guess there is latent music yet in France—floods

of it.
O I hear already the bustle of instruments—they will

soon be drowning all that would interrupt them;
O I think the east wind brings a triumphal and free

march,
It reaches hither—it swells me to joyful madness,
I will run transpose it in words, to justify it,
I will yet sing a song for you, ma femme!

___________

EUROPE,

THE 72ND AND 73RD YEARS OF THESE STATES.*

I.

SUDDENLY, out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of

slaves,
Like lightning it leaped forth, half startled at itself,
Its feet upon the ashes and the rags—its hands tight to

the throats of kings.

O hope and faith!
O aching close of exiled patriots’ lives!

* The years 1848 and 1849.

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

O many a sickened heart!
Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh.

2.

And you, paid to defile the People! you liars, mark!
Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming

from his simplicity the poor man’s wages,
For many a promise sworn by royal lips, and broken, and

laughed at in the breaking,
Then in their power, not for all these did the blows strike

revenge, or the heads of the nobles fall;
The People scorned the ferocity of kings.

3.

But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction, and

the frightened rulers come back;
Each comes in state with his train—hangman, priest, tax-

gatherer,
Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.

4.

Yet behind all, lowering, stealing—lo, a Shape,
Vague as the night, draped interminably, head, front, and

form, in scarlet folds,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Whose face and eyes none may see:
Out of its robes only this—the red robes, lifted by the

arm—
One finger crooked, pointed high over the top, like the

head of a snake appears.

5.

Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves—bloody

corpses of young men;
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of

princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh

aloud,
And all these things bear fruits—and they are good.

Those corpses of young men,
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets—those hearts

pierced by the gray lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem, live elsewhere with

unslaughtered vitality.

They live in other young men, O kings!
They live in brothers, again ready to defy you!
They were purified by death—they were taught and

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed

for freedom, in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and resow, and the rains and

the snows nourish.

Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let

loose,
But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering, coun-

selling, cautioning.

6.

Liberty! let others despair of you! I never despair of

Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready—be not weary of watching:
He will soon return—his messengers come anon.

___________

TO A FOILED REVOLTER OR
REVOLTRESS.

I.

COURAGE! my brother or my sister!
Keep on! Liberty is to be subserved, whatever

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

That is nothing that is quelled by one or two failures, or

any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by

any unfaithfulness,
Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon,

penal statutes.

2.

What we believe in waits latent forever through all the

continents, and all the islands and archipelagoes of

What we believe in invites no one, promises nothing, sits

in calmness and light, is positive and composed,

knows no discouragement,
Waiting patiently, waiting its time.

3.

The battle rages with many a loud alarm, and frequent

advance and retreat,
The infidel triumphs—or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garrote, hand-cuffs, iron necklace and

anklet, lead-balls, do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

The great speakers and writers are exiled—they lie sick in

distant lands,
The cause is asleep—the strongest throats are still, choked

with their own blood,
The young men droop their eyelashes toward the ground

when they meet;
But for all this, Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor

the infidel entered into full possession.

When liberty goes out of a place 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 there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,
And when all life, and all the souls of men and women are

discharged from any part of the earth,
Then only shall Liberty be discharged from that part of the

earth,
And the infidel and the tyrant come into possession.

4.

Then courage! revolter! revoltress!
For till all ceases, neither must you cease.

5.

I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am

for myself, nor what any thing is for,)

CHANTS DEMOCRATIC.

But I will search carefully for it even in being foiled,
In defeat, poverty, imprisonment—for they too are great.

Did we think victory great?
So it is—but now it seems to me, when it cannot be helped,

that defeat is great,
And that death and dismay are great.

MANHATTAN ARMING.

I.

FIRST, O songs, for a prelude,
Lightly strike on the stretched tympanum, pride

and joy in my city,
How she led the rest to arms—how she gave the cue,
How at once with lithe limbs, unwaiting a moment, she

sprang;
O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!
O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer

than steel!
How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of

peace with indifferent hand;
How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and

fife were heard in their stead;
How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude,

songs of soldiers,)
How Manhattan drum-taps led.