^>mw Y a-'-' ^i .1 .s^li#fff-.<^\K .S!?^ &:>mmm J University of California Berkeley Purchased from ALEXANDER GOLDSTEIN MEMORIAL FUND ^ Photo 'd /row life, Sept., '72, Brooklyn, N. Y. by 0. F. E. Pearsall, Fulton St. (Printed by C. F. Spieler, Phila.) For the Eternal Ocean bound, These ripples, passing surges, streams of Death and Life. TWO RI VUL ETS Including DEMOCRATIC VISTAS, CENTENNIAL SONGS, and PASSAGE TO INDIA. AUTHOR'S EDITION. CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY. 1876. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by WALT WHITMAN, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Federal St., Camden. CONTENTS. ....of the WHOLE VOLUME, TWO RIVULETS. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. CENTENNIAL SONGS- -1876. AS A STRONG BIRD ON PINIONS FREE. MEMORANDA DURING THE WAR. PASSAGE TO INDIA. ( Whole No. of Paget in the Volume, 350.) of Two RIVULETS Poems. Page. Two Rivulets 15 Or from that Sea of Time 16 Eidtflona 17 Spain, 1873-74 20 Prayer of Columbus 21 Out from Behind this Mask 24 To a Locomotive in Winter 25 The Ox-Tamer 27 Wandering at Morn 28 An Old Man's Thought of School 29 With all Thy Gifts, &c 30 From My Last Years 30 Page. In FormerSongs 31 After the Sea-Ship 32 Prose. Thoughts for the Centennial 15 to 22 Nationalty (and Yet) 23 Origins Darwinism (Then Furthermore) 26 New Poetry California, Mississippi, Texas 28 Rulers strictly Out of The Masses 30 Fine Manners Transportation 31 Women and Conscience Freedom ., 31 PREFACE. AT the eleventh hour, under grave illness, I gather up the pieces of Prose and Poetry left over since publishing, a while since, my first and main Volume, LEAVES OF GRASS pieces, here, some new, some old nearly all of them (sombre as many are, making this almost Death's book) composed in by-gone atmospheres of perfect health and, preceded by the freshest collection, the little Two RIVU LETS, and by this rambling Prefatory gossip,* now send them out, embodied in the present Melange, partly as my contribution and outpouring to celebrate, in some sort, the feature of the time, the first Centennial of our New World Nationality and then as chyle and nutriment to that moral, Indissoluble Union, equally representing All, and the mother of many coming Centennials. And e'en for flush and proof of our America for reminder, just as much, or more, in moods of towering pride and joy, I keep my special chants of Death and Immortalityt to *This Preface is not only for the present collection, but, in a sort, for all my writings, both Volumes. fPASSAGE TO INDIA. -As in some ancient legend- play, to close the plot and the hero's career, there is a farewell gathering on ship's deck and on shore, a loosing of hawsers and ties, a spreading of sails to the wind a start ing out on unknown seas, to fetch up no one knows whither to return ne more And the curtain falls, and there is the end of it So I have reserv'cl that Poem, with its cluster, to finish and explain much that, without them, would not be explain'd, and to take leave, and escape for good, from all that has preceded them. (Then probably Passage to India, and its cluster, are but freer vent and fuller expression to what, from the first, and so on throughout, more or less lurks in my writings, underneath every page, every line, every where.) I am not sure but the last enclosing sublimation of Race or Poem is, What it thinks of Death After the rest has been comprehended and said, even the grandest After those contributions to mightiest Nationality, or to sweet est Song, or to the best Personalism, male or female, have been glean'd from the rich and varied themes of tangible life, and have been fully accepted and 6 Preface. stamp the coloring-finish of all, present and past. For termi nus and temperer to all, they were originally written ; and that shall be their office at the last. For some reason not explainable or definite to my own mind, yet secretly pleasing and satisfactory to it I have not hesitated to embody in, and run through the Volume, two altogether distinct veins, or strata Politics for one, and for the other, the pensive thought of Immortality. Thus, too, the prose and poetic, the dual forms of the present book The pictures from the Hospitals during the War, in Memo randa, I have also decided to include. Though they differ in character and composition from the rest of my pieces, yet I feel that that they ought to go with them, and must do so The present Voiume, therefore, after its minor episodes, probably divides into these Two, at first sight far diverse, sung, and the pervading fact of visible existence, with the duty it devolves, is rounded and apparently completed, it still remains to be really completed by suffusing through the whole and several, that other pervading invisible fact, so large a part, (is it not the largest part?) of life here, combining the rest, and furnishing, for Person or State, the only permanent and unitary meaning to all, even the meanest life, consistently with the dignity of the Universe, in Time As, from the eligibility to this thought, and the cheerful conquest of this fact, flash forth the first distinctive proofs of the Soul, so to me, (extend ing it only a little further,) the ultimate Democratic purports, the ethereal and spiritual ones, are to concentrate here, and as fixed stars, radiate hence. For, in my opinion, it is no less than this idea of Immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to Democracy in the New World. It was originally my intention, after chanting in LEAVES OP GRASS the songs of the Body and Existence, to then compose a further, equally need ed Volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen Soul govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the theme of my first chants, to shift the slides, and exhibit the problem and paradox of the same ardent and fully ap pointed Personality entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of Spirit ual Law, and with cheerful face estimating Death, not at all as the cessation , but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the greatest part of existence, and something that Life is at least as much for, as it is for itself. But the full construction of such a work (even if I lay the foundation, or give impetus to it) is beyond my powers, and must remain for some bard in the future. The physical and the sensuous, in themselves or in their imme diate continuations, retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely re- leas'd ; and those holds I have not only not denied, but hardly wish'd to weaken. Meanwhile, not entirely to give the go-by to my original plan, and far more to avoid amark'd hiatus in it, than to entirely fulfil it, I end my books with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on Death, Immortality, and a free entrance into the Spiritual world. In those thoughts, in a sort, I make the first steps or studies toward the mighty theme, from the point of view neces- Preface. 7 veins of topic and treatment. One will be found in the prose part of Two RIVULETS, in Democratic Vistas, in the Preface to As a Strong Bird, and in the concluding Xotes to Memoranda of the Hospitals. The other, wherein the all-en grossing thought and fact of Death is admitted, (not for itself so much as a powerful factor in the adjustments of Life,) in the realistic pictures of Memoranda, an'd the free speculations and ideal escapades of Passage to India. Has not the time come, indeed, in the development of the New World, when its Politics should ascend into atmospheres and regions hitherto unknown (far, far different from the miserable business that of late and current years passes un der that name) and take rank with Science, Philosophy and Art ? Three points, in especial, have become very dear to me, and all through I seek to make them again and again, sitated by my foregoing poems, and by Modern Science. In them I also seek to set the key-stone to my Democracy's enduring arch. I re-collate them now, for the press, (.much the same, I transcribe my Memoranda following, of gloomy times out of the War, and Hospitals,) in order to partially occupy and offset clays of strange sickness, and the heaviest affliction and bereavement of my life ; and I fondly please myself with the notion of leaving that cluster to you, O unknown Reader of the future, as ' something to remember me by,' more especially than all else. Written in former days of perfect health, little did I think the pieces had the purport that now, under present circumstances, opens to me. [As I write these lines, May 31, 1875, it is again early summer again my birth-day now my fifty-sixth. Amid the outside beauty and freshness, the sunlight and verdure of the delightful season, O how different the moral atmosphere amid which I now revise this Volume, from the jocund influences surrounding the growth and advent of LEAVES OP GRASS. I occupy myself, arranging these pages for publication, still envelopt in thoughts of the death two years since of my dear Mother, the most perfect and magnetic character, the rarest combination of practical, moral and spiritual, and the least selfish, of all and any I have ever known and by me O so much the most deeply loved and also under the physical affliction of a tedious attack of paralysis, obstinately lingering and keeping its hold upon me, and quite suspending all bodily activity and comfort I see now, much clearer than ever perhaps these experiences were needed to show how much my former poems, the bulk of them, are indeed the expression of health and strength, and sanest, joyful- est life.] Under these influences, therefore, I still feel to keep Passage to India for last words even to this Centennial dithyramb. Not as, in antiquity, at high est festival of Egypt, the noisome skeleton of Death was also sent on exhibi tion to the revellers, for zest and shadow to the occasion's joy and light but as the perfect marble statue of the normal Greeks at Elis, suggesting death in the form of a beautiful and perfect young man, with closed eyes, leaning on an inverted torch emblem of rest and aspiration after action of crown and point which all lives and poems should steadily have reference to, namely, the ustified and noble termination of our identity, this grade of it, and outlet- pre paration to another grade. 8 Preface. in many forms and repetitions, as will be seen : 1. That the true growth-characteristics of the Democracy of the New World are henceforth to radiate in superior Literary, Artistic and Religious Expressions, far more than in its Republican forms, universal suffrage, and frequent elections, (though these are unspeakably important) 2. That the vital politi cal mission of The United States is, to practically solve and settle the problem of two sets of rights the fusion, thorough compatibility and junction of individual State prerogatives, with the indispensable necessity of centrality and Oneness ' the National Identity power the sovereign Union, relent less, permanently comprising all, and over all, and in that never yielding an inch then 3d. Do we not, amid a gen eral malaria of Fogs and Vapors, our day, unmistakably see two Pillars of Promise, with grandest, indestructible indica tions One, that the morbid facts of American politics and society everywhere are but passing incidents and flanges of our unbounded impetus of growth weeds, annuals, of the rank, rich soil not central, enduring, perennial things ? The Other, that all the hitherto experience of The States, their first Century, has been but preparation, adolescence and that This Union is only now and henceforth (i. e. since the Secession war) to enter on its full Democratic career? Of the whole, Poems and Prose, (not attending at all to chronological order, and with original dates and passing allusions in the heat and impression of the hour, left shuffled in, and undisturb'd,) the chants of LEAVES OF GRASS, my former Volume, yet serve as the indispensable deep soil, or basis, out of which, and out of which only, could come the roots and stems more definitely indicated by these later pages. (While that Volume radiates Physiology alone, the present One, though of the like origin in the main, more palpably doubtless shows the Pathology which was pretty sure to come in time from the other.) In that former and main Volume, composed In the flush of my health and strength, from the age of 30 to 50 years, I dwelt on Birth and Life, clothing my ideas in pictures, days, transactions of my time, to give them positive place, identity saturating them with that vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form'd America from the accumulated folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling anti-democratic authorities of the Asiatic and European past my enclosing purport being to express, above all artificial regulation and aid, the eternal Bodily Character of One's-Self.* ^LEAVES OF GRASS Namely, a Character, making most of common and normal elements, to the superstructure of which not only the precious accu mulations of the learning and experiences of the Old World, and the settled social and municipal necessities and current requirements, so long a-building, Preface. 9 The varieties and phases, (doubtless often paradoxical, contradictory.) of the two Volumes, of LEAVES, and of these RIVULETS, are ultimately to be considered as One in struc ture, and as mutually explanatory of each other as the multiplex results, like a tree, of series of successive growths, (yet from one central or seed-purport) there having been five or six such cumulative issues, editions, commencing back in 1855 and thence progressing through twenty years down to date, (1875-76) some things added or re-shaped from time to time, as they were found wanted, and other things represt. Of the former Book, more vehement, and perhaps pursuing a central idea with greater closeness shall still faithfully contribute, but which, at its foundations and carried up thence, and receiving its impetus from the Democratic spirit, and accepting its gauge, in all departments, from the Democratic formulas, shall again directly be vitalized by the perennial influences of Nature at first hand, and the old heroic stamina of Nature, the strong air of prairie and mountain, the dash of the briny sea, the primary antiseptics of the passions, in all their fullest heat and potency, of courage, rankness, amativeness, and of immense pride Not to lose at all, therefore, the benefits of artificial progress and civilization, but to re-occupy for Western tenancy the oldest though ever- fresh fields, and reap from them the savage and sane nourishment indispensa ble to a hardy nation, and the absence of which, threatening to become worse and worse, is the most serious lack and defect to-day of our New World litera ture. Not but what the brawn of LEAVES OF GRASS is, I think, thoroughly spirit ualized everywhere, for final estimate, but, from the very subjects, the direct effect is a sense of the Life, as it should be, of flesh and blood, and physical urge, and animalism While there are other themes, and plenty of abstract thoughts and poems in the Volume While I have put in it (supplemented in the present Work by my prose Memoranda,) passing and rapid but actual glimpses of the great struggle between the Nation and the Slave-power, (1861- '<;.">,) as the fierce and bloody panorama of that contest unroll'd itself While the whole Book, indeed, revolves around that Four Years' War, which, as 1 was in the midst of it, becomes, in Drum- Taps, pivotal to the rest entire fol- low'd by Marches now the War is Over and here and there, before and after ward, not a few episodes and speculations that namely, to make a type- portrait for living, active, worldly, healthy Personality, objective as well as subjective, joyful and potent, and modern and free, distinctively for the use of the United States, male and female, through the long future has been, I nay, my general object. (Probably, indeed, the whole of these varied songs, and all my writings, both Volumes, only ring changes in some sort, on the ejaculation, How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real, is a Human Being, himself or herself.) Though from no definite plan at the time, I see now that I have uncon sciously sought, by indirections at least as much as directions, to express the whirls and rapid growth and intensity of the United States, the prevailing tendency and events of the Nineteenth Century, and largely the spirit of the whole current World, my time ; for I feel that I have partaken of that spirit, as I have been deeply interested in all those events, the closing of long- stretch'd eras and ages, and. illustrated in the history of the United States, the 10 Preface. join'd with the present One, extremely varied in theme I can only briefly reiterate here, that all my pieces, alternated through Both, are only of use and value, if an}^, as such an interpenetrating, composite, inseparable Unity. Two of the pieces in this Volume were originally Public Recitations the College Commencement Poem, As a Strong Bird and then the Song of the Exposition, to identify these great Industrial gatherings, the majestic outgrowths of the Modern Spirit and Practice and now fix'd upon, the grand est of them, for the Material event around which shall be concentrated and celebrated, (as far as any one event can opening of larger ones. (The death of President Lincoln, for instance, fitly, historically closes, in the Civilization of Feudalism, many old influences- drops on them, suddenly, a vast, gloomy, as it were, separating curtain. The world's entire dramas afford none more indicative none with folds more tragic, or more sombre or far spreading.) Since I have been ill, (1873-74-75,) mostly without serious pain, and with plenty of time and frequent inclination to judge my poems, (never composed with eye on the book-market, nor for fame, nor for any pecuniary profit,) I have felt temporary depression more than once, for fear that in LEAVES OF GRASS the moral parts were not sufficiently pronounc'd. But in my clearest and calmest moods I have realized that as those LEAVES, all and several, surely prepare the way for, and necessitate Morals, and are adjusted to them, just the same as Nature does and is, they are what, consistently with my plan, they must and probably should be (In a certain sense, while the Moral is the purport and last intelligence of all Nature, there is absolutely nothing of. the moral in the works, or laws, or shows of Nature. Those only lead inevi tably to it begin and necessitate it.) Then I meant LEAVES OP GRASS, as published, to be the Poem of Identity, (of Fours, whoever you are, now reading these lines) For genius must re alize that, precious as it may be, there is something far more precious, name ly, simple Identity, One's-self. A man is not greatest as victor in war, nor inventor or explorer, nor even in science, or in his intellectual or artistic capacity, or exemplar in some vast benevolence. To the highest Democratic view, man is most acceptable in living well the average, practical life and lot which happens to him as ordinary farmer, sea-farer, mechanic, clerk, laborer, or driver upon and from which position as a central basis or pedestal, while performing its labors, and his duties as citizen, son, husband, father and em ployed person, he preserves his physique, ascends, developing, radiating him self in other regions and especially where and when, (greatest of all, and nobler than the proudest mere genius or magnate in any field,) he fully re alizes the Conscience, the Spiritual, the divine faculty, cultivated well, ex emplified in all his deeds and words, through life, uncompromising to the end a flight loftier than any of Homer's or Shakspere's broader than all poems and bibles namely, Nature's own, and in the midst of it, Yourself, your own Identity, body and soul. (All serves, helps but in the centre of all. absorbing all, giving, for your purpose, the only meaning and vitality to all, master or mistress of all, under the law, stands Yourself.) To sing the Song of that divine law of Identity, and of Yourself, consistently with the Divine Law of the Universal, is a main intention of those LEAVES. Preface. 11 combine them,) the associations and practical proofs of the Hundred Years' life of the Republic. The glory of Labor, and the bringing together not only representatives of all the trades and products, but, fraternally, of all the Workmen of all the Nations of the World, (for this is the Idea behind the Centennial at Philadelphia,) is, to me, so welcome and inspiring a theme, that I only wish I were a younger and a fresher man, to attempt the enduring Book, of poetic char acter, that ought to be written about it. The arrangement in print of Two RIVULETS the- indi rectness of the name itself, (suggesting meanings, the start of other meanings, for the whole Volume) are but parts of the Venture which my Poems entirely are. For really they have all been Experiments, under the urge of powerful, quite irresistible, perhaps wilful influences, (even escapades,) to see how such things will eventually turn out and have been recited, as it were, by my Soul, to the special audience Something more may be added for, while I am about it, I would make a full confession. I also sent out LEAVES OF GRASS to arouse and set flowing in men's and women's hearts, young and old, (my present and future readers,) endless streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning, (surely more or less down underneath in most human souls,) this never-satisfied ap petite for sympathy, and this boundless offering of sympathy this universal democratic comradeship this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of ad hesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America I have given in that book, undis- guisedly, declaredly, the openest expression Poetic literature has long been the formal and conventional tender of art and beauty merely, and of a narrow, constipated, special amativeness. I say, the subtlest, sweetest, surest tie between me and Him or Her, who, in the pages of Calamus and other pieces realizes me though we never see each other, or though ages and ages hence must, in this way, be personal affection. And those be they few, or be they many are at any rate my readers, in a sense that belongs not, and can never belong, to better, prouder poems. Besides, important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the Calamus cluster of LEAVES OP GRASS, (and more or less running through that book, and cropping out in Drum- Taps,) mainly resides in its Political significance. In my opinion it is by a fervent, accepted development of Comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, North and South, East and West it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future, (I cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal'd into a Living Union. Then, for enclosing clue of all, it is imperatively and ever to be borne in mind that LEAVES OP GRASS entire is not to be construed as an intellectual or scholastic effort or Poem mainly, but more as a radical utterance out of the abysms of the Soul, the Emotions and the Physique an utterance ad justed to, perhaps born of, Democracy and Modern Science, and in its very nature regardless of the old conventions, and, under the great Laws, following only its own impulses. 12 Preface. of Myself, far more than to the world's audience. [See, fur ther on, Preface of As a Strong Bird, &c., 1872-1 Till now, by far the best part of the whole business is, that, these days, in leisure, in sickness and old age, my Spirit, by which they were written or permitted ere while, does not go back on them, but still and in calmest hours, fully, deliberately allows them. Estimating the American Union as so far and for some time to come, in its yet formative condition,! therefore now bequeath Poems and Essays as nutriment and influences to help truly assimilate and harden, and especially to furnish something toward what The States most need of all, and which seems to me yet quite misapplied in literature, name ly, to show them, or begin to show them, Themselves dis tinctively, and what They are for. For though perhaps the main points of all ages and nations are points of resemblance, and, even while granting evolution, are substantially the same, there are some vital things in which this Republic, as to its Individualities, and as a compacted Nation, is to spe cially stand forth, and culminate modern humanity. And these are the very things it least morally and mentally knows (though, curiously enough, it is at the same time faithfully acting upon them.) I count with such absolute certainty on the Great Future of The United States different from, though founded on, the past that I have always invoked that Future, and sur rounded myself with it, before or while singing my Songs.... (As ever, all tends to followings America, too, is a pro phecy. What, even of the best arid most successful, would be justified by itself alone ? by the present, or the material ostent alone? Of men or States, few realize how much they live in the future. That, rising like pinnacles, gives its main significance to all You and I are doing to-day. With out it, there were little meaning in lands or poems little purport in human lives All ages, all Nations and States, have been such prophecies. But where any former ones with prophecy so broad, so clear, as our times, our lands as those of the West ?) Without being a Scientist, I have thoroughly adopted the conclusions of the great Savans and Experimentalists of our time, and of the last hundred years, and they have interiorly tinged the chyle of all my verse, for purposes beyond. Fol lowing the Modern Spirit, the real Poems of the Present, ever solidifying and expanding into the Future, must vocalize the vastness and splendor and reality with which Scientism has invested Man and the Universe (all that is called Crea tion,) and must henceforth launch Humanity into new orbits, consonant with that vastness, splendor, and reality, (un known to the old poems,) like new systems of orbs, balanced Preface. 13 upon themselves, revolving in limitless space, more subtle than the stars. Poetry, so largely hitherto and even at pre sent wedded to children's tales, and to mere amorousness, up holstery and superficial rhyme, will have to accept, and, while not denying the Past, nor the Themes of the past, will be revivified by, this tremendous innovation, the Kosmic Spirit, which must henceforth, in my opinion, be the back ground and underlying impetus, more or less visible, of all first-class Songs. Only, (for me, at at any rate, in all my Prose and Poetry,) joyfully accepting Modern Science, and loyally following it without the slightest hesitation, there remains ever recog nized still a higher flight, a higher fact, the Eternal Soul of Man, (of all Else too,) the Spiritual, the Religious which it is to be the greatest office of Scientism, in my opinion, and of future Poetry also, to free from fables, crudities and super stitions, and launch forth in renewed Faith and Scope a hun dred fold. To me, the worlds of Religiousness, of the con ception of the Divine, and of the Ideal, though mainly la tent; are just as absolute in Humanity and the Universe as the world of Chemistry, or any thing in the objective worlds. To me, The Prophet and the Bard, Shall yet maintain themselves in higher circles yet, Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy interpret yet to them, God and Eidolons. To me, the crown of Savantism is to be, that it surely opens the way for a more splendid Theology, and for ampler and diviner Songs. No year, nor even century, will settle this. There is a phase of the Real, lurking behind the Real, which it is all for. There is also in the Intellect of man, in time, far in prospective recesses, a judgment, a last appellate court, which will settle it. In certain parts, in these flights, or attempting to depict or suggest them, I have not been afraid of the charge of ob scurity, in either of my Two Volumes because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim escapes and out lets must possess a certain fluid, serial character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when address'd to the Soul, is less definite form, outline, sculp ture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be architecture ; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best eifects thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor. Finally, as 1 have lived in fresh lands, inchoate, and in a revolutionary age, future-founding, I have felt to identify 14 Preface. the points of that age, these lands, in my recitatives, alto gether in my own way. Thus my form has strictly grown from my purports and facts, and is the analogy of them Within my time the United States have emerg'd from nebu lous vagueness and suspense, to full orbic, (though varied) decision have done the deeds and achieved the triumphs of half a score of centuries and are henceforth to enter upon their real history the way being now, (i. e. since the result of the Secession War,) clear'd of death-threatening impedi menta, and the free areas around and ahead of us assured and certain, which were not so before (the past century being but preparations, trial-voyages and experiments of the Ship, before her starting out upon deep water.) In estimating my Volumes, the world's current times and deeds, and their spirit, must be first profoundly estimated. Out of the Hundred Years just ending, (1776-1876,) with their genesis of inevitable wilful events, and new introductions, and many unprecedented things of war and peace, (to be realized better, perhaps only realized, at the remove of another Century hence) Out of that stretch of time, and especially out of the immediately preceding Twenty-Five Years, (1850-75,) with all their rapid changes, innovations, and audacious movements and bearing their own inevitable wilful birth-marks my Poems too have found genesis. w. w. Two Rivulets side by side, Two blended, parallel, strolling tides, Companions, travelers, gossiping as they journey. For the Eternal Ocean bound, These ripples, passing surges, streams of Death and Life, Object and Subject hurrying, whirling by, The Real and Ideal, Alternate ebb and flow the Days and Nights, (Strands of a Trio twining, Present, Future, Past.) In You, whoe'er you are, my book perusing, In I myself in all the World these ripples flow, All, all, toward the mystic Ocean tending. (O yearnful waves ! the kisses of your lips ! Your breast so broad, with open arms, firm, expanded shore !) THOUGHTS FOB THE CENTENNIAL. Thoughts even for America's first Centennial, (as for others, certainly waiting folded in hidden train, to duly round and complete their circles, mightier and mightier in the future,) do not need to be, and probably cannot be, literally originated, (for all thoughts are old,) so much as they need to escape from too vehement temporary coloring, and from all narrow and merely local influences and also from" the coloring and shaping through European feudalism and still need to be averaged by the scale of the Centuries, from their point of view entire, and presented thence, conformably to the freedom and vastness of modern science And even out of a Hundred Years, and on their scale, how small were the best thoughts, poems, conclusions and products, except for a certain invariable resemblance and uniform standard in the final thoughts, theology, poems, &c., of all nations, all civilizations, all centuries and times. Those precious legacies accumulations ! They come to us from the far-oft' from all eras, and all lands from Egypt, and India, and Greece and Rome and along through the middle and later ages, in the grand monarchies of Europe born under far different institutes and conditions from ours but out of the insight and inspiration of the same old Humanity the same old heart and brain the same old countenance yearningly, pensively looking forth Strictly speaking, they are indeed none of them new, and are indeed not ours originally ours, however, by inheritance. What we have to do to-day is to receive them cheerfully, ana to give them ensemble, and a modern American and Democratic physiognomy. 16 Two Rivulets. ^\y>XN/>rf^XV/\XV/XXNXNXXXXXN/>XNXN OR FROM THAT SEA OF TIME. i OR, from that Sea of Time, Spray, blown by the wind a double winrow-drift of weeds and shells ; (O little shells, so curious-convolute ! SQ limpid-cold and voiceless ! Yet will you not, to the tympans of temples held, Murmurs and echoes still bring up Eternity's music, faint and far, Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim strains for the Soul of the Prairies, Whisper'd reverberations chords for the ear of the West, joyously sounding Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable ;) Infinitessimals out of my life, and many a life, (For not my life and years alone I give all, all I give ;) These thoughts and Songs waifs from the deep here, cast high and dry, Wash'd on America's shores. Currents of starting a Continent new, Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid, Fusion of ocean and land tender and pensive waves, (Not safe and peaceful only waves rous'd and ominous too, Out of the depths, the storm's abysms Who knows whence ? Death's waves, Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter'd sail.) IN THOUGHTS for the Centennial, I need not add to the multiform and swelling preans, the self-laudation, the congratulatory voices, and the bringing to the front, and domination to-day, of Material Wealth, Products, Goods, Inventive Smartness, &c., (all very well, may-be.) But, just for a change, I feel like presenting these two reflections : 1. Of most foreign countries, small or large, from the remotest times known, down to our own, each has contributed after its kind, directly or indirectly, at least one great undying Song, to help vitalize and increase the valor, wis dom, and elegance of Humanity, from the points of view attainM by it up to date. The stupendous epics of India, the holy Bible itself, the Homeric can ticles, the Nibelungen, the Cid Campeador, the Inferno, Shakspere's dramas of the passions and of the feudal lords, Burns's songs. Goethe's in Germany, Tennyson's poems in England. Victor Hugo's in France, and many more, are the widely various yet integral signs or land-marks, (in certain respects the highest set up by the human mind and soul, beyond science, invention, politi cal amelioration, &c.,) narrating in subtlest, best ways, the long, long routes of History, and giving identity to the stages arrived at by aggregate Human ity, and the conclusions assumed in its progressive and varied civilizations Where is America's art-rendering-, in any thing like the spirit worthy of her self and the modern, to these characteristic immortal monuments'.' Two Rivulets. 17 EIDOLONS. I MET a Seer, Passing the hues and objects of the world, The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense, To glean Eidolons. Put in thy chants, said he, No more the puzzling hour, nor day nor segments, parts, put in, Put first before the rest, as light for all, and entrance-song of all, That of Eidolons. Ever the dim beginning ; Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle ; Ever the summit, and the merge at last, (to surely start again,) Eidolons! Eidolons! Ever the mutable ! Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering ; Ever the ateliers, the factories divine, Issuing Eidolons ! Lo ! I or you I Or woman, man, or State, known or unknown ; We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build, But really build Eidolons. The ostent evanescent ; The substance of an artist's mood, or savan's studies long. Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils, To fashion his Eidolon. 2. So far, in America, our Democratic Society, (estimating its variou 8 strata, in the mass, as one,) possesses nothing nor have we contributed any characteristic music, the finest tie of Nationality to make up for that glow ing, blood-throbbing, religious, social, emotional, artistic, indefinable, inde scribably beautiful charm and hold which fused the separate parts of the old Feudal societies together in their wonderful inter penetration, in Europe and Asia, of love, belief and loyalty, running one way like a living weft and picturesque responsibility, duty and blessedness, running like a warp the other way. (In the Southern States, under Slavery, much of the same.).. -In coincidence, and as things now exist in The States, what is more terrible, more alarming, than the total want of any such fusion and mutuality of love, belief and rapport of interest, between the comparatively few successful rich, and the great massess of the unsuccessful, the poor? As a mixed political and social question, is not this full of dark significance? Is it not worth con sidering as a problem and puzzle in our Democracy an indispensable want to be supplied ? 3 18 Two Rivulets. Of every human life, (The units gather'd, posted not a thought, emotion, deed, left out ;) The whole, or large or small, summ'd, added up, In its Eidolon. The old, old urge ; Based on the ancient pintiacles, lo ! newer, higher pinnacles ; From Science and the Modern still impell'd, The old, old urge, Eidolons. The present, now and here, America's busy, teeming, intricate whirl, Of aggregate and segregate, for only thence releasing, To-day's Eidolons. These, with the past, Of vanish'd lands of all the reigns of kings across the sea. Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors' voyages, Joining Eidolons. Densities, growth, fagades, Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees, Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave, Eidolons everlasting. Exalte, rapt, extatic, The visible but their womb of birth, Of orbic tendencies to shape, and shape, and shape. The mighty Earth-Eidolon. DEMOCRACY in the New World, estimated and summ'd- up to-day, having thoroughly justified itself the past hundred years, (as far a growth, vitality and power are concern'd,) by severest and most varied trials of peace and war, and having establish'd itself for good, with all its necessi ties ard benefits, for time to come, is now to be seriously consider 'd also in its pronoune'd and already developt dangers. While the battle was raging, and the result suspended, all defections and criticisms were to be hush'd, and every thing bent with vehemence unmitigated toward the urge of victory. But that victory settled, new responsibilities advance. I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by Democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infi nite corruptions of Democracy. By the unprecedented opening-up of Hu manity en-masse in the United States, the last hundred years, under our in stitutions, not only the good qualities of the race, but just as much the bad ones, are prominently brought forward, Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom. " The ideal form of human society," Canon Kingsley declares, " is demo cracy. A nation and were it even possible, a whole world of free men, lifting free foreheads to God and Nature ; calling no man master, for One is their master, even God ; knowing and doing their duties toward the Maker of the Universe, and therefore to each other; not from fear, nor calculation of profit or loss, but because they have seen the beauty of righteousness, and trust, and peace ; because the laV of God is in their hearts. Such a nation Two Rivulets. 19 All space, all time, (The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns, Swelling, collapsing, ending serving their longer, shorter use,) FilPd with Eidolons only. The noiseless myriads ! The infinite oceans where the rivers empty ! The separate, countless free identities, like eyesight ; The true realities, Eidolons. Not this the World, Nor these the Universes they the Universes, Purport and end ever the permanent life of life, Eidolons, Eidolons. Bej'ond thy lectures, learn'd professor, Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope, observer keen be yond all mathematics, Beyond the doctor's surgery, anatomy beyond the chemist with his chemistry, The entities of entities, Eidolons. Unfix'd,yet fix'd; Ever shall be ever have been, and are, Sweeping the present to the infinite future, Eidolons, Eidolons, Eidolons. The prophet and the bard, Shall yet maintain themselves in higher stages yet, Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy interpret yet to them, God, and Eid61ons. such a society what nobler conception of moral existence can we form? Would not that, indeed, be the kingdom of God come on earth?" To this faith, founded in the Practical as well as the Ideal, let us hold and never abandon or lose it ! Then what a spectacle is practically exhibit ed by our American Democracy to-day ! THOUGH I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of ab solute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the subject which I find possessing many good people. The advent of America, the history of the past century, has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average Human Commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advan tage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities to this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far.... But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In 20 Two Rivulets. And thee, My Soul! Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations ! Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet, Thy mates, Eidolons. Thy Body permanent, The Body lurking there within thy Body, The only purport of the Form thou art the real I myself, An image, an Eidolon. Thy very songs, not in thy songs ; No special strains to sing none for itself ; But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating, A round, full-orb'd Eidolon. SPAIN, 1873-74. OUT of the murk oi heaviest clouds, Out of the feudal wrecks, and heap'd-up skeletons of kings, Out of that old entire European debris the shattered mum meries, Ruin'd cathedrals, crumble of palaces, tombs of priests, Lo I Freedom's features, fresh, undirnm'd, look forth the same immortal face looks forth : (A glimpse as of thy Mother's face, Columbia, A flash significant as of a sword, Beaming towards thee.) Nor think we forget thee. Maternal ; Lag'd'st thou so long ? Shall the clouds close again upon thee ? Ah, but thou hast Thyself now appear'd to us we know thee ; Thou hast given us a sure proof, the glimpse of Thyself ; Thou waitest there, as everywhere, thy time. nothing is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something beyond namely, the sane, eternal moral ;ind spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements. (We cannot have even that real ization on any less terms than the price we are now paying for it.) Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the chyle of sociology in id literature. They will finally make the blood and the brawn of the best American Individualities of both sexes and thus, with them, to a certainty, (through thene very processes of to-day,) dominate the New World. Two Rivulets. 21 PRAYER OF COLUMBUS. IT was near the close of his indomitable and pious life on his last voyage when nearly 70 years of age that Columbus, to save his two remaining ships from foundering in the Caribbean Sea in a terrible storm, had to run them ashore on the Island of Jamaica where, laid up for a long and miserable year 1503 he was taken very sick, had several relapses, his men revolted, and death seem'd daily imminent ; though he was eventually rescued, and sent home to Spain to die, unrecognized, neglected and in want It is only ask'd, as preparation and atmosphere for the following lines, that the bare authentic facts be recall'd and realized, and nothing contributed by the fancy. See, the Antillean Island, with its florid skies and rich foliage and scenery, the waves beating the solitary sands, and the hulls of the ships in the distance. See, the figure of the great Admiral, walking the beach, as a stage, in this sublimest tragedy for what tragedy, what poem, so piteous and ma jestic as the real scene? and hear him uttering-^-as his mystical and religious soul surely utter'd, the ideas following perhaps, in their equivalents, the very words. A BATTER 'D, wreck'd old man, Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home, Pent by the sea, and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months, Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken'd, and nigh to death, I take my way along the island's edge, Tenting a heavy heart. I am too full of woe ! Haply, I may not live another day ; I can not rest, O God I can not eat or drink or sleep, Till I put forth forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee, Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee commune with Thee, Report myself once more to Thee. Thou knowest my years entire, my life, (My long and crowded life of active work not adoration merely ;) Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth ; Thou knowest my manhood's solemn and visionary medita tions ; IF YOU GO to Europe, (to say nothing of Asia, more ancient and massive still,) you cannot stir without meeting venerable memen toscathedrals, ruins of temples, castles, monuments of the great, statues and paintings, (far, far beyond any thing America can ever expect to pro duce,) haunts of heroes long dead, saints, poets, divinities, with deepest asso ciations of ages But here in the New World, While those we can never emulate, we have more than those to build, and far more greatly to build. (I am not sure but the day for conventional monuments, statues, memorials, &c., has pass'd away and that they are henceforth superfluous and vulgar.) An enlarged general superior Humanity, (partly indeed resulting from those), we are to build. European. Asiatic greatness are in the past, vaster and subtler, America, combining, justifying the past, yet works for a grander tuture, in living Democratic forms. (Here too are indicated the paths for our .National bards.) Other times, other lands, have had their missions Art, Two Rivulets. Thou knowest how, before I commenced, I devoted all to come to Thee ; Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows, and strictly kept them ; Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee ; (In shackles, prison'd, in disgrace, repining not. Accepting all from Thee as duly come from Thee.) All my emprises have been fill'd with Thee, My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee, Sailing the deep, or journeying the land for Thee ; Intentions, purports, aspirations mine leaving results to Thee. I am sure they really came from Thee ! The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will, The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words, A message from the Heavens, whispering to me even in sleep, These sped me on. By me, and these, the work so far accomplished, (for what has been, has been ;) By me Earth's elder, cloy'd and stifled lands, uncloy'd, un- loos'd ; By me the hemispheres rounded and tied the unknown to the known. The end I know not it is all in Thee ; Or small, or great, I know not haply, what broad fields, what lands ; Haply, the brutish, measureless human undergrowth I know, Transplanted there, may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee; War, P'cclesiasticism, Literature, Discovery, Trade, Architecture, &c., &c., but that is the enclosing purport of The United States. THOUGH These States are to have their own Individuality, and show it forth with courage in all their expressions, it is to be a large, tolerant, and all-inclusive Individuality. Ours is to be the Nation of the Kosmos : we want nothing small nothing unfriendly or crabbed here But rather to become the friend and well-wisher of all as we derive our sources from all, and are in continual communication with all. OF A grand and universal Nation, when one appears, per haps it ought to have morally what Nature has physically, the power to take in and assimilate all the human strata, all kinds of experience, and all theo ries, and whatever happens or occurs, or offers itself, or fortune, or what is call'd misfortune. Two Rivulets. Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn'd to reaping-tools ; Haply the lifeless cross I know Europe's dead cross may bud and blossom there. One effort more my altar this bleak sand : That Thou, O God, my life hast lighted, With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, (Light rare, untellable lighting the very light ! Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages!) For that, God be it my latest word here on my knees, Old, poor, and paralyzed I thank Thee. My terminus near, The clouds already closing in upon me, The voyage balk'a the course disputed, lost, I yield my ships to Thee. Steersman unseen ! henceforth the helms are Thine ; Take Thou command (what to my petty skill Thy naviga tion ?) My hands, my limbs grow nerveless ; My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd ; Let the old timbers part I will not part ! I will cling fast to Thee, God, though the waves buffet me ; Thee, Thee, at least, I know. Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving ? What do I know of life ? what of myself? I know not even my own work, past or present ; Dim, ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer, better worlds, their mighty parturition, Mocking, perplexing me. And these things I see suddenly what mean they ? As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal'd my eyes, Shadowy, vast shapes, smile through the air and sky, And on the distant waves sail countless ships, And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me. NATIONALITY (AND TET.) It is more and more clear to me that the main sustenance for highest separate Personality, These States, is to come from that general sustenance of the a cosion, graneur an reeom o te common aggregate, the Union. ......... Thus the existence of the true American, Continental Solidarity of the tuture, depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and physi cally perfect Individualities, of one sex just as much as the other, the supplv Two Rivulets. OUT FROM BEHIND THIS MASK. To confront My Portrait, illustrating ' the Wound- Dresser? in LEAVES OF GRASS. 1 OUT from behind this bending, rough-cut Mask, (All straighter, liker Masks rejected this preferr'd,) This common curtain of the face, contain'd in me for me, in you for you, in each for each, (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears heaven ! The passionate, teeming plays this curtain hid !) This glaze of God's serenest, purest sky, This film of Satan's seething pit, This heart's geography's map this limitless small conti nent this soundless sea : Out from the convolutions of this globe, This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon than Jupiter, Venus, Mars ; This condensation of the Universe (nay, here the only Universe, Here the IDEA all in this mystic handful wrapt ;) These burin'd eyes, flashing to you, to pass to future time, To launch and spin through space revolving, sideling from these to emanate, To You, whoe'er you are a Look. of such Individualities, in my opinion, wholly depends on a compacted im perial Ensemble. The theory and practice of both sovereignties, contradic tory as they are, are necessary. As the centripetal law were fatal alone, or the centrifugal law deadly and destructive alone, but together forming the law of eternal Kosmical action, evolution, preservation, and life so, by itself alone, the fullness of Individuality, even the sanest, would surely destroy itself. This is what makes the importance to the identities of These States of the thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union, a moral and spiritual Idea subjecting all the parts with remorseless power, more needed by American Democracy than by any of history's hitherto empires or feudali ties, and the sine qua non of carrying out the Republican principle to devel- ope itself in the New World through hundreds, thousands of years to come. Indeed, what most needs development through the Hundred Years to come in all parts of the United States, North, South, Mississippi valley, and Atlan tic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the Flag, the Stars and Stripes We need this conviction of Nationality as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the people everywhere, South, North, West, East, to emanate in their life, and in native literature and art. We want the ger minal idea that America, inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future of Humanity Judging from history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas appropriate to them, (and such ideas only,) that have made the pro- tbundest glory and endurance of nations in the past. The races of Judea, the classic clusters of Greece and Rome, and the Feudal and Ecclesiastical clusters of the Middle Ages, were each and all vitalized by their separate distinctive ideas, ingrained in them, redeeming many sins, and indeed, in a sense, the principal reason- why for their whole career. Then, in the thought of Nationality especially for the United States, and Two Rivulets. A Traveler of thoughts and years of peace and war, Of youth long sped, and middle age declining, ( As the first volume of a tale perused and laid away, and this the second, Songs, ventures, speculations, presently to close,) Lingering a moment, here and now, to You I opposite turn, As on the road, or at some crevice door, by chance, or open'd window, Pausing, inclining, baring my head, You specially 1 greet, To draw and clench your Soul, for once, inseparably with mine, Then travel, travel on. TO A LOCOMOTIVE IN WINTER. THEE for my recitative ! Thee in the driving storm, even as now the snow the winter-day declining ; Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive ; Thy black cylindric body, golden braes, and silvery steel ; Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides ; Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar now tapering in the distance ; making Them original, and different from all other countries, another point ever remains to be consider'd There are two distinct principles aye, paradoxes at the life-fountain and life-continuation of 'The States : one, the sacred principle of the Union, the right of ensemble, at whatever sacrifice and yet Another, an equally sacred principle, the right of Each State, coii- sider'd as a separate sovereign individual, in its own sphere. Some go zeal ously for one set of these rights, and some as zealously for the other set. We must have both ; or rather, bred out of them, as out of mother and father, a Third set, the perennial result and combination of both, and neither jeopar dized. I say the loss or abdication of one set. in the future, will be ruin to Democracy just as much as the loss of the other set. The problem is, to harmoniously adjust the two, and the play of the two [Observe the lesson of the divinity in Nature, ever checking the excess of one law, by an oppo site, or seemingly opposite law generally the other side of the same law.] For the theory of this Republic is, not that the General government is the fountain of all life and power, dispensing it forth, around, and to the re motest portions of our territory, but that THE PEOPLE are, represented in Both, underlying both the General and State governments, and considerM just as well in their individualities and in their separate aggregates, or States, as consider'd in one vast Aggregate, as the Union. This was the original dual theory and foundation of the United States, as distinguish 'd from the feudal and ecclesiastical single idea of monarchies and papacies, and the divine right of kings (Kings have been of use, hitherto, as representing the idea of the identity of nations. But, to American Democracy, both ideas must be fulfill'd, and in my opinion the loss of vitality of either one will in deed be the loss of vitality of the other.) Two Rivulets. Thy great protruding head-light, fix'd in front ; Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple ; The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke stack; Thy knitted frame thy springs and valves the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels ; Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following, Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering : Type of the modern ! emblem of motion and power ! pulse of the continent ! For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee. With storm, and buffeting gusts of wind, and falling snow ; By day, thy warning, ringing bell to sound its notes, By night, thy silent signal lamps to swing. Fierce-throated beauty ! Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music ! thy swinging lamps at night ; Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter ! thy echoes, rumb ling like an earthquake, rousing all ! Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding ; (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,) Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd, Laimch'd o'er the prairies wide across the lakes, To the free skies, unpent, and glad, and strong. ORIGINS Darwinism ( Then Furthermore.} Running through pre-historic ages coming down from them into the day-break of our records, founding theology, suffusing literature, and so brought onward (a isort of verteber and marrow to all the antique races and lands, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews, &c., and giving cast and complexion to their art, poems, and their politics as well as ecclesiasticism, all of which we more or less inherit,) appear those venerable claims to origin from God himself, or from Gods and Goddesses ancestry from divine beings of vaster beauty, size and power than ours But in current and latest times, the theory of human origin that seems to have most made its mark, (curiously reversing the antique) is, that we have come on, originated, developt, from monkeys, baboons a theory more significant perhaps in its indirections, or what it necessitates, than it is even in itself. (Of the foregoing speculations twain, far apart as they seem, and angrily as their conflicting advocates to-day oppose each other, are not both theories to be possibly reconciled , and even blended ? Can we , indeed , spare either of them? Better still, out of them, is not a Third Theory, the real one, or sug gesting the real one, to arise?) Of this old theory, Evolution, as broach'd anew, trebled, with indeed all- devouring claims, by Darwin, it has so much in it, and is so needed as a counterpoise to yet widely prevailing and unspeakably tenacious, enfeebling Miperstitioiis is fused, by the new man, into such grand, modest, truly scien tific accompaniments that the world of erudition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually better'd and broaden'd from its speculations from the advent of Darwinism. Nevertheless, the problem of origins, human and other, is not the least whit nearer its solution. In due time the Evolution theory will have to abate its vehemence, cannot be allow'd to dominate every Two Rivulets. 27 THE OX TAMER. IN a faraway northern county, in the placid, pastoral region, Lives mv farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous Tamer of Oxen : There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year- olds, to break them ; He will take the wildest steer in the world, and break him and tame him ; He will go, fearless, without any whip, where the young bullock chafes up and down the yard ; The bullock's head tosses restless high in the air, with raging eyes ; Yet, see you ! how soon his rage subsides how soon this Tamer tames him : See you! on the farms hereabout, a hundred oxen, young and old and he is the man who has tamed them ; They all know him all are affectionate to him ; See you! some are such beautiful animals so lofty looking ! Some are buff color'd some mottled one has a white line running along his back some are brindled. Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign) See you ! the bright hides ; See, the two with stars on their foreheads See, the round bodies and broad backs ; See, how straight and square they stand on their legs See, what fine, sagacious eyes ; See, how they watch their Tamer they wish him near them how they turn to look after him ! tiling else, and will have to take its place as a segment of the circle, the cluster as but one of many theories, many thoughts, of profoundest value and re-adjusting and differentiating much, yet leaving the divine secrets just as inexplicable and unreachable as before may-be more so. Then furthermore What is finally to be done by Priest or Poet and by Priest or Poet only amid all the stupendous and dazzling novelties of our Century, with the advent of America, and of Science and Democracy re mains just as indispensable, after all the work of the grand astronomers, chemists, linguists, historians and explorers, of the last hundred years and the wondrous German and other metaphysicians of that time anil will con tinue to remain, needed, America and here, just the same as in the World of Europe or Asia, of a hundred, or a thousand, or several thousand years ago. I think indeed more needed, to furnish statements from the present points, the added arriere, and the unspeakably immenser vistas of to-day Onlv the Priests and Poets of the modern, at least as exalted as any in the past, fully absorbing and appreciating the results of the past, in the' commonalty of all Humanity, all Time, (the main results already, for there is perhaps nothing more, or at any rate not much, strictly new, only more important modern combinations, and new relative adjustments.) must indeed recast the old metal, the already achiev'd material, into and through new moulds, cur rent forms Meantime, the highest and subtlest and broadest truths of modern Science wait for their true assignment and lust vivid flashes of light as Democracy waits for its through first-class Metaphysicians and Specula tive Philosophs laying the basements and foundations for those new, more expanded, more harmonious, more melodious, freer American Poems. Two Rivulets. What yearning expression ! how uneasy they are when he moves away from them : -Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics, poems, depart all else departs ;) 1 confess I envy only his fascination my silent, illiterate friend, Whom a hundred oxen love, there in his life on farms, In the northern county far, in the placid, pastoral region. WANDERING AT MORN. WANDERING at morn, Emerging from the night, from gloomy thoughts thee in my thoughts, Yearning for thee, harmonious Union! thee, Singing Bird divine! Thee, seated coil'd in evil times, my Country, with craft and black dismay with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee ; Wandering this common marvel I beheld the parent thrush I watch'd, feeding its young, (The singing thrush, whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic, Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.) There ponder'd, felt I, If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn'd, If vermin so transposed, so used, so bless'd may be, Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country ; Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you ? From these your future Song may rise, with joyous trills, Destin'd to fill the world. NEW POETRY California, Mississippi, Texas. Without deprecating at all the magnificent accomplishment, and boundless promise still, of the Paternal States, flanking the Atlantic shore, where I was born and grew, I see of course that the really maturing and Mature America is at least just as much to loom up, expand, and take definite shape, with im mensely added population, products and originality, from the States draiii'd by the Mississippi, and from those flanking the Pacific, or bordering the Gulf of Mexico. For the most cogent purposes of those great Inland States, and for Texas, and California and Oregon, (and also for universal reasons and purposes, which 1 will not now stop to particularize,) in my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between Prose and Poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there Acorns henceforward, to the perfect 'taste, something inevitably comic in Two Rivulets. 29 AN OLD MAN'S THOUGHT OF SCHOOL. [Recited for the inauguration of a New Public School, Camden, New Jersey, Oct. 31, 1874.] AN old man's thought of School ; An old man, gathering youthful memories and blooms, that youth itself cannot. Xow only do I know you ! O fair auroral skies ! 'O morning dew upon the grass ! And these I see these sparkling eyes, These stores of mystic meaning these young lives, Building, equipping, like a fleet of ships immortal ships! Soon to sail out over the measureless seas, On the Soul's voyage. Only a lot of boys and girls ? Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes ? Only a Public School? Ah more infinitely more ; (As George Fox rais'd his warning cry, " Is it this pile of brick and mortar these dead floors, windows, rails you call the church ? Why this is not the church at all the Church is living, ever living Souls.") And you, America, Cast you the real reckoning for your present? The lights and shadows of your future good or evil ? To girlhood, boyhood look the Teacher and the School. rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest POETRY, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and pasion In my opinion, 1 say, while admitting that the venera ble and heavenly forms of chiming Versification have in their time play'd great and fitting parts that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably render'd in rhyming verse that there have been very illustrious poets whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately envelopt and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty, on some of our own age it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as a medium of highest esthetic practical or spiritual expression, present or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the Prairies, and of the Peaks of Colorado, dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend the size of the Whole People, with the free play, emotions, pride, passions, experiences, that be long to them, Body and Soul to the General Globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray them to us to the Modern, the busy Nine teenth Century, (as grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, 30 Two Rivulets. WITH ALL THY GIFTS. WITH all thy gifts, America, (Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,) Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee With these, and like of these, vouchsafed to thee, What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving ;) The gift of Perfect Women fit for thee What of that gift of gifts thou lackest ? The towering Feminine of thee ? the beauty, health, com pletion, fit for thee ? The Mothers fit for thee ? FROM MY LAST YEARS. FROM my last years, last thoughts I here bequeath, Scatter'd and dropt, in seeds, and wafted to the West, Through moisture of Ohio, prairie soil of Illinois through C9lorado, California air, For Time to germinate fully. railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder presses to the thought of the Solidarity of Nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire Earth To the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories, found ries, workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or on lakes arid rivers resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more eligible soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of Prose. RULERS, STRICTLY OUT OF THE MASSES. In the talk (which I welcome) about the need of men of training, thoroughly school 'd and experienced men, for Statesmen, I would present the following as an otf- set. It was written by me twenty years ago and has been curiously veritied since by the advent of Abraham Lincoln : I say no body of men are fit to make Presidents, Judges, and Generals, un less they themselves supply the best specimens of the same ; and that supply ing one or two such specimens illuminates the whole body for a thousand years. I expect to see the day when the like of the present personnel of the Governments, Federal, State, municipal, military, and naval, will be look'd upon with derision, and when qualified Mechanics and young men will reach Congress and other official stations, sent in their working costumes, fresh from their benches and tools, and returning to them again with dignity. The young fellows must prepare to do credit to this destiny, for the stuff is in them. Nothing gives place, recollect, and never ought to give place, except to its clean superiors. There is more rude and undevelopt bravery, friend ship, conscientiousness, clear-sightedness, and practical genius for any scope of action, even the broadest andhighest, now among the American Mechan ics and young men, than in all the official persons in These States, legisla tive, executive, judicial, military, and naval, and more than among all the literary persons. 1 would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully- inforni'd, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American Blacksmith or Boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency, dress'd in a clean suit of working attire, and with the ta all over his face, breast, and arms; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, possessing the due requirements, before any other candidate. Two Rivulets. 31 IN FORMER SONGS. IN former songs Pride have I sung, and Love, and passion ate, joyful Life, But here I twine the strands of Patriotism and Death. And now, Life, Pride, Love, Patriotism and Death, To you, FREEDOM, purport of all ! (You that elude me most refusing to be caught in songs of mine,) I offer all to you. 2 'Tis not for nothing, Death, 1 sound out you, and words of you, with daring tone em bodying you, In my new Democratic chants keeping you for a close, For last impregnable retreat a citadel and tower, For my last stand my pealing final cry. ' FINE MANNERS.' In certain moods I have question'd whether far too much is not made of Manners. To an artist entirely great and especially to that far-advanced stage of judgment beyond mortality which Kant is fond of suggesting as a standard and test we can conceive that all of what is popularly cail'd ' fine manners ' would be of little or no account and only positive qualities, power, interior meanings, sanities, morals, emotions, would be noticed The Exquisite-Manners School, if not foreign to Democracy, is surely no help to it ; but moral and manly Person- alism is the help. Why not, like Nature, permit no glamour to affect us? (But are not really line manners the natural perfume, as it were, of all healthy, inward, even Democratic qualities?) TRANSPORTATION, EXPRESSES, &c. I am not sure but the most typical and representative things in the United States are what are involved in the vast network of Interstate Railroad Lines our Electric Tele graphsour Mails, (post-offices) and the whole of the mighty, ceaseless, com plicated (and quite perfect already, tremendous as they are) systems of Trans portation everywhere of passengers, freight and intelligence. No words, no painting, can too strongly depict the fulness and grandeur of these the smallest minutiae attended to, and in their totality incomparably magnificent. WOMEN, AND CONSCIENCE. In my judgment it is strictly true that on the present supplies of imaginative literature the current novels, tales, romances, and what is cail'd ' poetry ' enormous in quantity, and utterly tainted and unwholesome in quality, lies the responsibility, (a great part of it, anyhow,) of the absence in modern society of a noble, stal wart, and healthy and maternal race of Women, and of a strong and domi nant moral Conscience. FREEDOM. It is not only true that most people entirely misunderstand Freedom, but I sometimes think I have not yet met one per son who rightly understands it The whole Universe is absolute Law. Freedom only opens entire activity and license under the law. To the de graded or undevelopt and even to too many others the thought of freedom i* a thought of escaping from law which, of course, is impossible. More precious than all worldly riches, is Freedom freedom from the pain ful constipation and poor narrowness of ecclesiasticism freedom in manners, habiliments, furniture, from the silliness and tyranny of local fashions en tire freedom from party rings and mere conventions in Politics and better than all, a general freedom of One's-Self from the tyrannic domination of 32 Two Rivulets. AFTER THE SEA-SHIP. AFTER the Sea-Ship after the whistling winds ; After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars and ropes, Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks, Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship : Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying, Waves, undulating waves liquid, uneven, emulous waves, Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves, Where the great Vessel, sailing and tacking, displaced the surface ; Larger and smaller waves, in the spread of the ocean, yearn- fully flowing ; The wake of the Sea-Ship, after she passes flashing and frolicsome, under the sun, A motley procession, with many a fleck of foam, and many fragments, Following the stately and rapid Ship in the wake following. vices, habits, appetites, under which nearly every man of us, (often the greatest bawler for freedom,) is enslaved. Can we attain such enfranchisement the true Democracy, and the height of it? While we are from birth to death the subjects of irresistible law, enclosing every movement and minute, we yet escape, by a paradox, into true free will. Strange as it may seem, we only attain to freedom by a knowledge of, and implicit obedience to Law. Great unspeakably great is the Will ! the free Soul of man ! At its greatest, understanding and obeying the laws, it can then, and then only, maintain true liberty For there is to the highest, that law as absolute as any more absolute than any the Law of Liberty. The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individ ual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones, which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the eV tire objective world, and the last dignity to human life. DEMOCRATIC 1ST Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by WALT WHITMAN, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Electrotyped by SMITH & McDouGAL, 82 Beekman Street, New York. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. AMERICA, filling the present with greatest deeds -*- and problems, cheerfully accepting the past, including Feudalism, (as, indeed, the present is but the legitimate birth of the past, including feudalism,) counts, as [ reckon, for her justification and success, (for who, as yet, dare claim success?) almost entirely on the future. Nor is that hope unwarranted. To-day, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring. For our New World I consider far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come. Sole among nationalities, These States have assumed the task to put in forms of lasting power and practi cality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral and political specula tions of ages, long, long deferred, the Democratic Re publican principle, and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-suppliance. Who else, indeed, except the United States, in history, so far, have accepted in unwitting faith, and, as we now see, stand, act upon, and go security for, these things ? But let me strike at once the key-note of my purpose in the following strain. First premising that, though passages of it have been written at widely different times, (it is, in fact, a collection of memoranda, perhaps for future designers, comprehenders,) and though it may be open to the charge of one part contradicting another for there are opposite sides to the great ques tion of Democracy, as to every great question I feel 4 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. tlie parts harmoniously blended in my own realization and convictions, and present them to be read only in such oneness, each page modified and tempered by the others. Bear in mind, too, that they are not the result of studying up in political economy, but of the ordinary sense, observing, wandering among men, These States, these stirring years of war and peace. I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, be tween Democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the People's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this book. I shall use the words America and Democracy as con vertible terms. Not an ordinary one is the Issue. The United States are destined either to surmount the gor geous history of Feudalism, or else prove the moso tre mendous failure of time. Not the least doubtful am I on any prospects of their material success. The trium phant future of their business, geographic, and produc tive departments, on larger scales and in more varieties than ever, is certain. In those respects the Republic must soon (if she does not already) outstrip all ex amples hitherto afforded, and dominate the world.* * "From a territorial area of less than nine hundred thou sand square miles, the Union lias expanded into over four mil lions and a half fifteen times larger than that of Great Britain and France combined with a shore-line, including Alaska, equal to the entire circumference of the earth, and with a domain within these lines far wider than that of the Romans in their proudest days of conquest and renown. With a river, lake, and coastwise commerce estimated at over two thousand millions of dollars per year ; with a railway traffic of four to six thousand millions per year, and the annual domestic exchanges of the country running up to nearly ten thousand millions per year ; with over two thousand millions of dollars invested in manufac turing, mechanical, and mining industry ; with over five hun dred millions of acres of land in actual occupancy, valued, w r ith their appurtenances, at over seven thousand millions of dollars, and producing annually crops valued at over three thousand mil lions of dollars ; with a realm which, if the density of Belgium's DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 5 Admitting all this, with the priceless value of our political institutions, general suffrage (and cheerfully acknowledging the latest, widest opening of the doors,) I say that, far deeper than the^e, what finally and only is to make of our Western World a National ity superior to any hitherto known, and outtopping the past, must be vigorous, yet unsuspected Litera tures, perfect personalities and sociologies, original, transcendental, and expressing (what, in highest sense, are not yet expressed at all,) Democracy and the Mod ern. With these, and out of these, I promulge new races of Teachers, and of perfect Women, indispen sable to endow the birth-stock of a New World. For Feudalism, caste, the Ecclesiastic traditions, though ' palpably retreating from political institutions, still hold essentially, by their spirit, even in this country, entire possession of the more important fields, indeed the very subsoil, of education, and of social standards and Literature. I say that Democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it ^founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of arts, "poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. It is curious to me that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &G.J are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dan gers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus, and the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to pres- population were possible, would be vast enough to include all the present inhabitants of the world ; and with equal rights guaran teed to even the poorest and humblest of our forty millions of people we can, with a manly pride akin to that which distin guished the palmiest days of Rome, claim," &c., &c., &c. Vice- Prcsident Golf ax's Speech, July 4, 1870. 6 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. ent conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native Authors, Literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American men tality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Con gresses, radiating, begetting appropriate teachers and schools, manners, costumes, and, as its grandest re sult, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and without which this nation will no more stand, per manently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of The States. For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all know how to read and write, and may all possess the right to vote and yet the main things may be entirely lacking ? (and this to supply or suggest them.) Viewed, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the di vine Literatus comes. Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in The States, the Post of the Modern is wanted, or the great Literatus of the Mod ern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really swayed the most, and whence it sways others, is its national litera ture, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previ ous lands, a great original literature is surely to be come the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American Democracy. Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with irresistible power, con structs, sustains, demolishes at will. Why tower, in DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 7 reminiscence, above all the old nations of the earth, two special lands, petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic, beautiful, columnar ? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal lives, in a couple of poems. Nearer than this. It is not generally realized, but it is true, as the genius of Greece, and all the sociology, personality, politics and religion of those wonderful states, resided in their literature or esthetics, that what was afterwards the main support of European chivalry, the feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world over there, forming its osseous structure, holding it together for hundreds, thousands of years, preserving its flesh and bloom, giving it form, decision, rounding it out, and so saturating it in the conscious and unconscious blood, breed, belief, and intuitions of men, that it still pre vails powerfully to this day, in defiance of the mighty changes of time, was its literature, permeating to the very marrow, especially that major part, its enchant ing songs, ballacls, and poems.* To the ostent of the senses and eyes, I know, the in fluences which stamp the world's history are wars, up risings or downfalls of dynasties, changeful movements of trade, important inventions, navigation, military or civil governments, advent of powerful personalities, conquerors, &c. These of course play their part ; yet, it may be, a single new thought, imagination, prin ciple, even literary style, fit for the time, put in shape by some great Literatus, and projected among man- * See, for hereditaments, specimens, Walter Scott's Border Min strelsy, Percy's Collection, Ellis's Early English Metrical Ro mances, the European Continental Poems of Walter of Aquita- nia, and the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction ; the history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel ; even the far, far back cumbrous old Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian eggs, out of which European chivalry was hatched , Ticknor's chapters on the Cid, and on the Spanish poems and poets of Cal- deron's time. Then always, and, of course, as the superbest, poetic culmination-expression of Feudalism, the Shakspcarean dramas, in the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c., of the princes, lords and gentlemen, the pervading atmosphere, the implied and expressed standard of manners, the high port and proud ctomach, the regal embroidery of style, &c. 8 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. kind, may duly cause change?, growths, removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely political, dynastic, or com mercial overturn. In short, as, though it may not be realized, it is strictly true, that a few first-class poets, philosophs, and authors, have substantially settled and given status to the entire religion, education, law, sociology, &c., of the hitherto civilized world, by tinging and often crea ting the atmospheres out of which they have arisen, such also must stamp, and more than ever stamp, the interior and real Democratic construction of this Ameri can continent, to-day, and days to come. Remember also this fact of difference, that, while through the antique and through the mediaeval ages, highest thoughts and ideals realized themselves, and their expression made its way by other arts, as much as, or even more than by, technical literature, (not open to the mass of persons, nor even to the majority of eminent persons,) such literature in our day and for current purposes, is not only more eligible than all the other arts put together, but lias become the only gen eral means of morally influencing the world. Faint ing, sculpture, and the dramatic theatre, it would seem, no longer play an indispensable or even im portant part in the workings and mediumship of in tellect, utility, or even high esthetics. Architecture remains, doubtless with capacities, and a real future. Then music, the combiner, nothing more spiritual, noth ing more sensuous, a god, yet completely human, ad vances, prevails, holds highest place; supplying in cer tain wants and quarters what nothing else could supply. Yet, in the civilization of to-day it is undeniable that, over all the arts, literature dominates, serves beyond all shapes the character of church and school or, at any rate, is capable of doing so. Including the litera ture of science, its scope is indeed unparalleled. Before proceeding further, it were perhaps well to discriminate on certain points. Literature tills its crops in many fields, and some may flourish, while others lag. What I say in these Yistas has its main DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 9 bearing on Imaginative Literature, especially Poetry, the stock of all. In the department of Science, and the specialty of Journalism, there appear, in These States, promises, perhaps fulfilments, of highest earnestness, reality, and life. These, of course, are modern. But in the region of imaginative, spinal and essential attri butes, something equivalent to creation is imperatively demanded. For not only is it not enough that the new blood, new frame of Democracy shall be vivified and held together merely by political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, &c., but it is clear to me that, un less it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men's hearts, emotions and belief, as, in their days, Feudalism or Ecclesiasticism, and inaugurates its own perennial sources, welling from the -centre forever, its strength will be defective, its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting. I suggest, therefore, the possibility, should some two or three really original American poets, (perhaps artists or lecturers,) arise, mounting the horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, that, from their eminence, fusing contributions, races, far localities, &c., together, they would give more compaction and more moral iden tity, (the quality to-day most needed,) to These States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and -judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic experiences. As, for instance, there could hardly hap pen anything that would more serve The States, with all their variety of origins, their diverse climes, cities, standards, &c., than possessing an aggregate of heroes, characters, exploits, sufferings, prosperity or misfor tune, glory or disgrace, common to all, typical of all no less, but even greater would it be to possess the aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teach ers, fit for us, national expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men and women of The States, what is universal, native, common to all, inland and seaboard, northern and southern. The historians say of ancient Greece, with her ever-jealous autonomies, cities, and states, that the only positive unity she ever owned or received, was the sad unity of a common subjection, at 10 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. the last, to foreign conquerors. Subjection, aggrega tion of that sort, is impossible to America ; but the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me. Or, if it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a long period to come, of a fusion of The States into the only reliable identity, the moral and artistic one. For, I say, the true nationality of The States, the genuine union, when we come to a mortal crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects but the fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with re sistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinc tions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power. It may be claimed, (and I admit the weight of the claim,) that common and general worldly prosperity, and a populace well-to-do, and with all life's material comforts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may be argued that our Kepublic is, in performance, really enacting to-day the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beat ing up the wilderness into fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, &c. And it may be asked, Are these not better, indeed, for America, than any utterances even of greatest rhapsode, artist, or literate ? I too hail those achievements with pride and joy : then answer that the soul of man will not with such only nay, not with such at all be finally satisfied ; but needs what, (standing on those and on all things, as the feet stand on the ground,) is addressed to the loftiest, to itself alone. Out of such considerations, such truths, arises for treatment in these Yistas the important question of Character, of an American stock-personality, with Literatures and Arts for outlets and return-expres sions, and, of course, to correspond, within outlines common to all. To these, the main affair, the thinkers of the United States, in general so acute, have either given feeblest attention, or have remained, and re main, in a state of somnolence. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 11 For my part, I would alarm and caution even the political and business reader, and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing delusion that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty, in dustry, &c., (desirable and precious advantages as they all are,) do, of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of Democracy the fruitage of success. With such advantages at present fully, or almost fully, pos sessed the Union ^just issued, victorious, from the struggle with the only foes it need ever fear, (namely, those within itself, the interior ones,) and with unpre cedented materialistic advancement Society, in These States, is cankered, crude, superstitious, and rotten. Political, or law-made society is, and private, or volun tary society, is also. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most important, the vertebrae, to State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking or seriously enfeebled or ungrown. I say we had best look our time and lands search- ingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of The States are not honestly believed in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melo-dramatic sereaniings,) nor is Humanity itself believed in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe, not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the Eevenue Depart ment in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, North, South, and West, to investigate frauds, has talked much with 12 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. me (1869-70) about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The whole of the official services of America, National, State, and Munici pal, in all their branches and departments, except the Judiciary, are steeped, saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration ; and the Judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fash ionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In busi ness, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The ma gician's serpent in the fable ate up ail the other ser pents ; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a, mob of fashionably-dressed speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be discovered, existing crudely and going on in the background, to ad vance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our New World De mocracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, pro ducts, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popu lar intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, in any superb general personal character, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unpre cedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the an tique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Borne. In vain do we annex Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. Let me illustrate further, as I write, with current ob servations, localities, &c. The subject is important, and will bear repetition. After an absence, I am now (Sep- DEMOCRATIC: VISTAS. 13 tember, 1870,) again in New York City and Brooklyn, on a few weeks' vacation. The splendor, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpassed situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea- tides, costly and lofty new buildings, the facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance of design, with the masses of gay color, the preponderance of white and blue, the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, mu sical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night ; the jobbers' houses, the rich shops, the wharves, the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of Hills, (as I wander among them this beautiful fall weather, musing, watching, absorbing,) the assemblages of the citizens in their groups, conversations, trade, evening amuse ments, or along the by-quarters these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy my senses of power, ful ness, motion, &c., and give me, through such senses and appetites, and through my esthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and absolute fuliilment. Always, and more and more, as I cross the East and North rivers, the ferries, or with the pilots in their pilot-houses, or pass an hour in Wall street, or the gold exchange, I realize, (if we must admit such par tiali sins,) that not Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and the open air, in her storms, the shows of night and day, the mountains, forests, seas but in the artificial, the work of .man too is equally great in this profusion of teeming humanity, in these ingenuities, streets, goods, houses, ships these seething, hurrying, feverish crowds of men, their complicated business genius, (not least among the geniuses,) and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry concentrated here. But sternly discarding, shutting our eyes to the glow and grandeur of the general effect, coming down to what is of the only real importance, Personalities, and exam ining minutely, we question, we ask, Are there, indeed, Men here worthy the name ? Are there athletes ? Are there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beau tiful manners? Are there crops of fine youths, and raa- 14 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. jestic old persons? Are there arts worthy Freedom, and a rich people ? Is there a great moral and religious civilization the only justification of a great material one ? Confess that rather to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sa hara appears, these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vul garity, low cunning, infidelity everywhere, the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe everywhere an abnormal libidinousneas, unhealthy forms, male, fe male, painted, padded, dyed, chignoned, muddy com plexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood, deceasing or deceased, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (consid ering the advantages enjoyed,) probably the meanest to be seen in the world.* Of all this, and these lamentable conditions, to breathe into them the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life, I say a new founded Literature, not merely to copy and reflect existing surfaces, or pander to wiiat is called taste not only to amuse, pass away time, celebrate the beautiful, the refined, the past, or exhibit technical, * Of these rapidly-sketched portraitures, hiatuses, the two which seem to me most serious are, for one, the condition, absence, or perhaps the singular abeyance, of moral, conscientious fibre all tli rough American society; and, for another, the appalling deple tion of women in their powers of sane athletic maternity, their crowning attribute, and ever making the woman, in loftiest spheres, superior to the man. I have sometimes thought, indeed, that the sole avenue and means of a reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth, elevation, expansion, invigoration of woman, affording, for races to come, (as the conditions that antedate birth are indispen sable,) a perfect motherhood. Great, groat, indeed far greater than they know, is the sphere of women. But doubtless the question of such new sociology all goes together, includes many varied and complex influences and premises, and the man as well as the woman., and the woman as well as the man. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 15' rhythmic, or grammatical dexterity but a Literature underlying life, religious, consistent with science, hand ling the elements and forces with competent power, teaching and training men and, as perhaps the most precious of its results, achieving the entire redemption of woman out of these incredible holds and webs of sil liness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic depletion and thus insuring to The States a strong and sweet Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers is what is needed. . And now, in the full conception of these facts and points, and all that they infer, pro and con- with yet unshaken faith in the elements of the American masses, the composites, of both sexes, and even considered as individuals and ever recognizing in them the broad est bases of the best literary and esthetic appreciation I proceed with my speculations, Vistas. First, let us see what we can make out of a brief, gen eral, sentimental consideration of political Democracy, and whence it has arisen, with regard to some of its current features, as an aggregate, and as the basic structure of our future literature and authorship. We shall, it is true, quickly and continually find the origin- idea of the singleness of man, individualism, asserting itself, and cropping forth, even from the opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump character, for imperative rea sons, is to be ever carefully weighed, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of Individualism. The two are contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them.* * The question hinted here is one which time only can answer. Must not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarg ing, usurping all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, the like of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of general country? I have no doubt myself that the two will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and that from them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at present they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in the United States. 16 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. The political history of the past may be summed up as having grown out of what underlies the words Order, Safety, Caste, and especially out of the need of some prompt deciding Authority, and of" Cohesion, at all cost. Leaping time, we come to the period within the memory of people now living, when, as from some lair where they had slumbered long, accumulating wrath, sprang up and are yet active, (1790, and on even to the present, 1870,) those noisy eructations, destructive icon- oclasms, a fierce sense of wrongs, and amid which moves the Eorni, well known in modern history, in the old world, stained with much blood, and marked by savage reactionary clamors and demands. These bear, mostly, as on one enclosing point of need. For after the rest is said after the many time-hon ored and really true things for subordination, experi ence, rights of property, &c., have been listened to and acquiesced in after the valuable and well-settled state ment of our duties and relations in society is thoroughly conned over and exhausted it remains to bring forward and modify everything else with the idea of that Some thing a man is, (last precious consolation of the drudg ing poor,) standing apart from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or art. The radiation of this truth is the key of the most sig nificant dojngs of our immediately preceding three centuries, and has been the political genesis and life of America. Advancing visibly, it still more advances in visibly. Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of society, as well as the movements of the politics of {he leading nations of the world, we see steadily press ing ahead, and strengthening itself, even in the midst of immense tendencies toward aggregation, this image of completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single person, either male or female, char acterized in the main, not from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or herself alone; and, as an eventual conclusion and summing up, (or EATIG VISTAS. 17 else the entire scheme of things is aimless, a cheat, a crash,) the simple idea that the last, best dependence is to be upon Humanity itself, and its own inherent, nor mal, full-grown qualities, without any superstitious sup port whatever. This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the Aggregate. For it is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization, consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality and freedom to the rights of the States, (every bit as important as the right of Nationality, the union,) that we insist on the identity of the Union at all hazards. The purpose of Democracy supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of established dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly trained in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto him self, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations to other individ uals,' and to the State ; and that, while other theories, as in the past histories of nations, have proved wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions, this, as matters now stand in our civilized world, is the only Scheme worth working from, as warranting results like those of Nature's laws, reliable, when once estab lished, to carry on themselves. The argument of the matter is extensive, and, we ad mit, by no means all on one side. What we shall offer will be far, far from sufficient. But while leaving un said much that should properly even prepare the way for the treatment of this many-sided question of politi cal liberty, equality, or republicanism leaving the whole history and consideration of the Feudal Plan and its products, embodying Humanity, its politics and civili zation, through the retrospect of past time, (which Plan and products, indeed, make up all of the past, and a major part of the present) Leaving unanswered, at 18 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. least by any specific and local answer, many a -well- wrought argument and instance, and many a conscien tious declamatory cry and warning as, very lately, from an eminent and venerable person abroad* things, problems, full of doubt, dread, suspense, (not new to me, but old occupiers of many an anxious hour in city's din, or night's silence,) we still may give a page or so, whose drift is opportune. Time alone can finally answer these things. But as a substitute in passing, let us, even if fragmentarily, throw forth a short direct or indirect suggestion of the premises of that other Plan, in the new spirit, under the new forms, started here in our America. As to the political section of Democracy, which intro duces and breaks ground for further and vaster sec tions, few probably are the minds, even in These Re publican States, that fully comprehend the aptness of that phrase, " THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOE THE PEOPLE/' which we inherit from the lips of Abraham Lincoln ; a formula whose verbal shape is homely wit, but whose scope includes both the totality and all minutiae of the lesson. The People ! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, Man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated classes. The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic qual ities, but taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the masses, and remain so. There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and * (: SHOOTING NIAGARA." I was at first roused to much anger and abuse by this Essay from Mr. Carlyle, so insulting to the the ory of America but happening to think afterwards how I had more than once been in the like mood, during which his essay was evidently cast, and seen persons and things in the same light, (indeed some might say there are signs of the same feeling in this book) I have since read it again, not only as a study, expressing as it does certain judgments from the highest Feudal point of view, but have read it with respect, as coming from an earnest soul, and as contributing certain sharp-cutting metallic grains, which, if not gold or silver, may be good hard, honest iron. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 19 hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the Feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dressed and so handsome. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred. Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. Speaking generally, the tendencies of literature, as hith erto pursued, have been to mate mostly critical and querulous men. It seems as if, so far, there were some natural repugnance between a literary and professional life, and the rude rank spirit of the Democracies. There is, in later literature, a treatment of benevolence, a charity business, rife enough it is true ; but I know nothing more rare, even in this country, than a fit scien tific estimate and reverent appreciation of the People of their measureless wealth of latent power and capacity, their vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades with, in America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, far suspassing all the vaunted samples of book-heroes, or any haul ton coteries, in all the records of the world. The movements of the late Secession war, and their results, to any sense that studies well and compre hends them, show that Popular Democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts. Probably no future age can know, but I well know, how the gist of this fiercest and most resolute of the world's warlike contentions resided exclusively in the unnamed, unknown rank and file ; and how the brunt of its labor of death was, to all essential purposes, Volunteered. The People, of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently attacked by the Secession- Slave-Power, and its very existence imperiled. De scending to detail, entering any of the armies, and mixing with the private soldiers, we see and have seen augnst spectacles. We have seen the alacrity with which the American-born populace, the peaceablest and most good-natured race in the world, and the most personally independent and intelligent, and the least fitted to submit 20 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. to the irksomeness and exasperation of regimental disci pline, sprang, at the first tap of the drum, to arms not for gain, nor even glory, nor to repel invasion but for an emblem, a mere abstraction for. the life, the safety of the flag. We have seen the unequaled docility and obedience, of these soldiers. We have seen them tried long and long by hopelessness, mismanagement, and by defeat ; have seen the incredible slaughter toward or through which the armies, (as at first Fredericksburg, and afterward at the Wilderness,) still unhesitating ly obeyed orders to advance. We have seen them in trench, or crouching behind breastwork, or tramp ing in deep mud, or amid pouring rain or thick- falling snow, or under forced marches in hottest summer (as on the road to get to Gettysburg) vast suffocating swarms, divisions, corps, with every single man so grimed and black with sweat and dust, his own mother would not have known him his clothes all dirty, stained and torn, with sour, accumulated sweat for perfume many a comrade, perhaps a brother, sun-struck, staggering out, dying, by the roadside, of exhaustion yet the great bulk bearing steadily on, cheery enough, hollow-bellied from hunger, but sinewy with unconquerable resolution. We have seen this race proved by wholesale by drearier, yet more fearful tests the wound, the ampu tation, the shattered face or limb, the slow, hot fever, long, impatient anchorage in bed, and all the forms of maiming, operation and disease. Alas ! America have we seen, though only in her early youth, already to hospital brought. There have we watched these sol diers, many of them only boys in years marked their decorum, their religious nature and fortitude, and their sweet affection. Wholesale, truly. For at the front, and through the camps, in countless tents, stood the regi mental, brigade and division hospitals ; while every where amid the land, in or near cities, rose clusters of huge, white-washed, crowded, one-story wooden bar racks, (Washington City alone, with its suburbs, at one period, containing in her Army hospitals of this kind, 50,000 wounded and sick men) and there ruled Agony with bitter scourge, yet seldom brought a cry ; DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 21 and there stalked Death by day and night along the narrow aisles between the rows of cots, or by the blankets on the ground, and touched lightly many a poor sufferer, often with blessed, welcome touch. I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize that it is finally from what I learned personally mixing in such scenes that I am now penning these pages. One night in the gloomiest period of the war, in the Patent Office Hospital in Washington City, as I stood by the bedside of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick approaching death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, spiritual manner, the veteran surgeon, turning aside, said to me, that though he had witnessed many, many deaths of soldiers, and had been a worker at Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, &G., he had not seen yet the first case of man or boy that met the approach of dissolution with cowardly qualms or terror. My own observation fully bears out the remark. What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and argument, the plentifully-supplied, last-needed proof of Democracy, in its personalities ? Curiously enough, too, the proof on this point comes, I should say, every bit as much from the South, as from the North. Although I have spoken only of the latter, yet I delib erately include all. Grand, common stock ! to me the accomplished and convincing growth, prophetic of the future ; proof undeniable to sharpest sense, of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never Feudal lord, nor Greek, nor Roman breed, yet rivaled. Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of the American races, North or South, to one who has been through the war in the great army hospitals. Meantime, general Humanity, (for to that we return, as, for our purposes, what it really is, to bear in mind,) has always, in every department, been full of perverse maleficence, and is so yet. In downcast hours the Soul thinks it always will be but soon recovers from such sickly moods. I, as Democrat, see clearly enough, (as already illustrated,) the crude, defective streaks in all the strata of the common people ; the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit 22 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. and uncouth, the incapable, and the very low and poor. The eminent person just mentioned, sneeringly asks whether we expect to elevate and improve a Nation's politics by absorbing such morbid collections and qual ities therein. The point is a formidable one, and there will doubtless always be numbers of solid and reflective citizens who will never get over it. Our answer is gen eral, and is involved in the scope and letter of this essay. We believe the ulterior object of political and all other government,' (having, of course, provided for the police, the safety of life, property, and for the basic statute and common law, and their administration, always first in order,) to be, among the rest, not merely to rule, to re press disorder, &c., but to develop, to open up to culti vation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outer oppage, and of that aspiration for inde pendence, and the pride and self-respect latent in all characters. (Or, if there be exceptions, we cannot, fix ing our eyes on them alone, make theirs the rule for all.) I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civil ized lands, is not repression alone, and not authority alone, not even of law, nor by that favorite standard of the eminent writer, the rule of the best men, the born heroes and captains of the race, (as if such ever, or one time out of a hundred, get into the big places, elective or dynastic!) but, higher than the highest arbitrary rule, to train communities through all their grades, be ginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves. What Christ appeared for in the moral-spiritual field for Human-kind, namely, that in respect to the absolute Soul, there is in the possession of such by each single individual, something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations, (like life,) that, to that extent, it places all beings on a common level, utterly regardless of the dis tinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or any height or lowliness whatever is tallied in like manner, in this other field, by Democracy's rule that men, the Nation, as a common aggregate of living identities, affording in each a separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift and happiness, and for a fair chance for DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 23 growth, and for protection in citizenship, &c., must, to the political extent of the suffrage or vote, if no further, be placed, in each and in the whole, on one broad, pri mary, universal, common platform. The purpose is not altogether direct ; perhaps it is more indirect. For it is not that Democracy is of ex haustive account, in itself. Perhaps, indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of no account in itself. It is that, as we see, it is the best, perhaps only, fit and full means, formu- later, general caller-forth, trainer, for the million, not for grand material personalities only, but for immortal souls. To be a voter with the rest is not so much ; and this, like every institute, will have its imperfections. But to become an enfranchised mart, and now, impedi ments removed, to stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest ; to commence, or have the road cleared to commence, the grand experiment of develop ment, whose end, (perhaps requiting several genera tions,) m?,y be the forming of a full-grown man or woman that is something. To ballast the State is also secured, and in our times is to be secured, in no other way. We do not, (at any rate I do not,) put it either on the ground that the People, the masses, even the best of them, are, in their latent or exhibited qualities, essen tially sensible and good nor on the ground of their rights ; but that, good or bad, rights or no rights, the Democratic formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming times. We endow the masses with the suffrage for their own sake, no doubt ; then, perhaps still more, from another point of view, for community's sake. Leaving the rest to the sentimentalists, we pre sent Freedom as sufficient in its scientific aspects, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and passionless as crystal. Democracy too is law, and of the strictest, amplest kind. Many suppose, (and often in its own ranks the error,) that it means a throwing aside of law, and run ning riot. But, briefly, it is the superior law, not alone that of physical force, the body, which, adding to, it supersedes with that of the spirit. Law is the unshaka- 24 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. ble order of tlie universe forever ; and the law over all, and law of laws, is the law of successions ; that of the superior law, in time, gradually supplanting and over whelming the inferior one. (While, for myself, I would cheerfully agree first covenanting that the formative tendencies shall be administered in favor, or, at least not against it, and that this reservation be closely con strued that until the individual or community show due signs, or be so minor and fractional as not to en danger the State, the condition of authoritative tutel age may continue, and self-government must abide its time.) Nor is the esthetic point, always an important one, without fascination^for highest aiming souls. The com mon ambition strains for elevations, to become some privileged exclusive. The master sees greatness and health in being part of the mass. Nothing will do as well as common ground. Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law? Then merge yourself in it. And, topping Democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all na tions, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever- modern dream of Earth," out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. Not that half only, Individualism, which isolates. There is an other half, which is Adhesiveness or Love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all. Both are to be vitalized by Religion, (sole worthiest elevator of man or State,) breathing into the proud, material tissues, the breath of life. For I say at the core of Democracy, finally, is the Religious element. All the Religions, old and new, are there. Nor may the Scheme step forth, clothed in resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the best, the latest fruit, the Spiritual, shall fully appear. A portion of our pages we might indite with refer ence toward Europe, especially the British part of it, more than our own land, and thus, perhaps not abso- DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 25 lutely needed for the home reader. But the whole ques tion hangs together, and fastens and links all peoples. The Liberalist of to-day has this advantage over antique or medieval times, that his doctrine seeks not only to universalize, but to individualize. Then the great word Solidarity has arisen. I say of all dangers to a Nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having cer tain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery teems, of coarse, even on Democracy's side, yet does not really affect the orbic quality of the matter. To work in, if we may so term it, and justify God, his divine aggre gate, the People, (or, the veritable horned and sharp- tailed Devil, his aggregate, if there be who convulsively insist upon it,) this, I say, is what Democracy is for ; and this is what our America means, and is doing may I not say, has done ? If not, she means nothing more, and does nothing more, than any other land. And as, by virtue of its kosmical, antiseptic power, Nature's stomach is fully strong enough not only to digest the morbific matter always presented, not to be turned aside, and perhaps, indeed, intuitively gravitating thither but even to change such contributions into nutriment for highest use and life so American Democracy's. That is the lesson we, these days, send over to European lands by every western breeze. And, truly, whatever may be said in the way of ab stract argument, for or against the theory of a wider democratizing of institutions in any civilized country, much trouble might well be saved to all European lands by recognizing this palpable fact, (for a palpable fact it is,) that some form of such democratizing is about the only resource now left. That, or chronic dissatisfaction continued, mutterings which grow annually louder and louder, till, in due course, and pretty swiftly in most cases, the inevitable crisis, crash, dynastic ruin. Any thing worthy to be called statesmanship in the Old World, I should say, among the advanced students, 26 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. adepts, or men of any brains, does not debate to-day whether to hold on, attempting to lean back and mon- archize, or to look forward and democratize but how, and in what degree and part, most prudently to demo cratize. The difficulties of the transfer may be fearful ; perhaps none here in our America can truly know them. I, for one, fully acknowledge them, ancl sympathize deeply. But there is Time, and must be Faith ; and Opportunities, though gradual and slow, will every where abroad be born. There is (turning home again,) a thought, or fact, I must not forget subtle and vast, dear to America, twin-sister of its Democracy so ligatured indeed to it, that either's death, if not the other's also, would make that other live out life, dragging a corpse, a loathsome horrid tag and burden forever at its feet. What the idea of Messiah was to the ancient race of Israel, through storm and calm, through public glory and their name's humiliation, tenacious, refusing to be ar gued with, shedding all shafts of ridicule and disbelief, undestroyed by captivities, battles, deaths for neither the scalding blood of war, nor the rotted ichor of peace could ever wash it out, nor has yet a great Idea, bed ded in Judah's heart source of the loftiest Poetry the world yet knows continuing on the same, though all else varies the spinal thread of the incredible romance of that people's career along five thousand years, So runs this thought, this fact, amid our own land's race and history. It is the thought of Oneness, averaging, including all ; of Identity the indissoluble sacred Union of These States. The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reform ers and revolutionists are indispensable to counter balance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions. The latter will always take care of themselves the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us. The former is to be treated with in dulgence, and even respect. As circulation to air, so is agitation and a plentiful degree of speculative license DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 27 to political and moral sanity. Indirectly, but surely, goodness, virtue, law, (of the very best,) follow Free dom. Theso, to Democracy, are what the keel is to the ship, or saltness to the ocean. The true gravitation-hold of Liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort a vast, inter twining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold Universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied Nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property owners. So that, from another point of view, ungracious as it may sound, and a paradox after what we have been say ing, Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men and women with occupa tions, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank and with some cravings for litera ture, too ; and must have them, and hastens to make them. Luckily, the seed is already well-sown, and has taken ineradicable root.* Huge and mighty are our Days, our republican lands and most in their rapid shif tings, their changes, all in the interest of the Cause. As I write this pass- * For fear of mistake, I may as well distinctly announce, as cheerfully included in the model and standard of These Vistas, a practical, stirring, worldly, money-making, even materialistic character. It is undeniable that our farms, stores, offices, dry- goods, coal and groceries, enginery, cash-accounts, trades, earn ings, markets, &c., should be attended to in earnest, and actively pursued, just as if they had a real and permanent existence. I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are vital parts of amelioration and progress, and perhaps indispensa bly needed to prepare the very results I demand. My theory in cludes riches, and the getting of riclies, and the amplest products, power, activity, inventions, movements, c. Upon these, as upon substrata, I raise the edifice designed in These Vistas. 28 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. age, (November, 1868,) the din of disputation rages around me. Acrid the temper of the parties, vital the pending questions. Congress convenes ; the President sends his Message ; Reconstruction is still in abeyance ; the nominations and the contest for the twenty-first Presidentiad draw close, with loudest threat and bustle. Of these, and all the like of these, the eventuations I know not ; but well I know that behind them, and what ever their eventuations, the really vital things remain safe and certain, and all the needed work goes on. Time, with soon or later superciliousness, disposes of Presidents, Congressmen, party platforms, and such. Anon, it clears the stage of each and any mortal shred that thinks itself so potent to its day ; and at and after which, (with precious, golden exceptions once or twice in a century,) all that relates to sir potency is flung to moulder in a burial-vault, and no one bothers himself the least bit about it afterward. But the People ever remains, tendencies continue, and all the idiocratic transfers in unbroken chain go on. In a few years the dominion-heart of America will be far inland, toward the West. Our future National Capitol may not bo where the present one is. It is possible, nay likely, that in less than fifty years, it will migrate a thousand or two miles, will be re-founded, and every thing belonging to it made on a different plan, original, far more superb. The main social, political spine-character of The States will probably run along the Ohio, Missouri and Missis sippi Eivers, and west and north of them, including Canada. Those regions, with the group of powerful brothers toward the Pacific, (destined to the mastership of that sea and its countless Paradises of islands,) will compact and settle the traits of America, with all . the old retained, but more expanded, grafted on newer, hardier, purely native stock. A giant growth, compo site from the rest, getting their contribution, absorbing it, to make it more illustrious. From the North, Intel lect, the sun of things also the idea of unswayable Justice, anchor amid the last, the wildest tempests. From the South, the living Soul, the animus of good and bad, haughtily admitting no demonstration but its DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 29 own. While from the West itself comes solid Person ality, with blood and brawn, and the deep quality of all-accepting fusion. Political Democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making grand young men. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom's athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satis fies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success. Whatever we do not attain, we at any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the hardening of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt at least. Time is ample. Let the victors come after us. Not for nothing does evil play its part among men. Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery, meanness, the craft of tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out but soon and certain the lowering dark ness falls again, as if to last forever. Yet is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul that cannot, must not, under any circumstances, capitulate. Vive, the attack the perennial assault ! Vive, the un popular cause the spirit that audaciously aims the never-abandoned efforts, pursued the same amid oppo sing proofs and precedents. Once, before the war, (Alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!) I, too, was filled with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day putting in form, indeed, my own observations : I have traveled much in the United States, and watched their politicians, and listened to the speeches of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the public houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men. And I have found your vaunted America honey-combed from top to toe with infidelism, even to itself and its own programme. I 30 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. have marked the brazen hell-faces of secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the windows and door ways. I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the offices themselves. I have found the North just as full of bad stuff as the South. Of the holders of public office in the Nation, or in the States, or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the people, but all have been nomi nated and put through by little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and elec tioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politi cians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarm ing spectacle of parlies usurping the Government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes. Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper, amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and great and little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and over the powerfulest par ties, looms a Power, too sluggish may-be, but ever hold ing decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process, to execute them as soon as plainly needed, and at times, indeed, summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of their pride. In saner hours far different are the amounts of these things from what, at first sight, they appear. Though it is no doubt important who is elected President or Governor, Mayor or Legislator, (and full of dismay when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do,) there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important. Shams, &c., will always be the show, like ocean's scum ; enough, if waters deep and clear make up the rest. Enough, that while the piled embroidered shoddy gaud and fraud spreads to the superficial eye, the hidden warp and weft are gen uine, and will wear forever. Enough, in short, that the race, the land which could raise such as the late Rebel lion, could also put it down. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 31 The average man of a land at last only is important. He, in These States, remains immortal owner and boss, deriving good uses, somehow, out of any sort of servant in office, even the basest ; because, (certain universal requisites, and their settled regularity and protection, being first secured,) a Nation like ours, in a sort of geo logical formation state, trying continually new experi ments, choosing new delegations, is not served by the best men only, but sometimes more by those that pro voke it by the combats they arouse. Thus national rage, fury, discussion, &c., better than content. Thus, also, the warning signals, invaluable for after times. What is more dramatic than the spectacle we have seen repeated, and doubtless long shall see the pop ular judgment taking the successful candidates on trial in the offices standing off, as it were, and observing them and their doings for a while, and always giving, finally, the fit, exactly due reward ? I think, after all, the sublimest part of political his tory, and its culmination, is currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander, better ex ercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in humankind, than a well-contested American national election. Then still the thought returns, (like the thread-pass age in overtures,) giving the key and echo to these pages. When I pass to and fro, different latitudes, dif ferent seasons, beholding the crowds of the great cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, New Orleans,. Baltimore when I mix with these interminable swarms of alert, turbulent, good-natured, independent citizens, mechan ics, clerks, young persons at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, a singu lar awe falls upon me. I feel, with dejection and amaze ment, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, or created a single image-making work that could be called for them or absorbed the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs, and which, thus, 32 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. in highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpressed. Dominion strong is the body's ; dominion stronger is the mind's. What has filled, and fills to-day our intel lect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of Democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and basked and grown in castle sunshine ; all smells of princes' favors. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty" contributing after their kind ; many elegant, many learned, all complacent. But, touched by the National test, or tried by the standards of Democratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic Aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets ? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse ? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountain-top afar in the West, the scorn ful laugh of the Genius of These States. Democracy, in silence, biding its time, ponders its own ideals, not of Literature and Art only not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word Lady,) developed, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and. it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men greater than man, we may admit, through their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical attri butebut great, at any rate, as man, in all depart ments ; or, rather, capable of being so, soon as they realize it, and can bring themselves to give up toys and fictions, and launch forth, as men do, amid real, inde pendent, stormy life. Then, as toward our thought's finale, (and, in that, DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 33 overarching the true scholar's lesson,) wa Lave to say- there can be no complete or epical presentation of ."De mocracy in the aggregate, or any thing like it, at this clay, because its doctrines will only be effectually incar nated in any one branch, when, in all, their spirit is at the root and centre. Far, far, indeed, stretch, in dis tance, our vistas ! How much is still to be disentangled, freed ! How long it takes to make this world see that it is, in itself, the final authority and reliance ! Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name ? I say Democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest farms of interaction between men, and their beliefs in Religion, Literature, colleges, and schools Democracy in all public and private life, and in the Army and Navy.* I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propa gandists or champions, or has been essentially helped, though often harmed, by them. It has besn and is car ried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopped than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-received, the fervid, the ab solute faith. I submit, therefore, that the fruition of Democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future. As, under any profound and comprehensive view of the gorgeous-composite Feudal world, we see The whole present system of the officering and personnel of the^Army and Navy of These States, and the spirit and letter of their trebly-aristocratic rules and regulations, is a monstrous ex otic, a nuisance and revolt, and belong here just as much as orders of nobility, or the Pope.'s council of Cardinals. I say if the pres ent theory of our Army and Navy is sensible and true, then the rest of America is an unmitigated' fraud. 34 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. in it, through the long ages and cycles of ages, the re sults of a deep, integral, human and divine principle, or fountain, from which issued laws, ecclesia, manners, in stitutes, costumes, personalities, poems, (hitherto une- qualed,) faithfully partaking of their source, and in deed only arising either to betoken it, or to furnish parts of that varied-flowing display, whose centre was one and absolute so, long ages hence, shall the due historian or critic make at least an equal retrospect, an equal History for the Democratic principle. It, too, must be adorned, credited with its results then, when it, with imperial power, through amplest time, has domi nated mankind has been the source and test of all the moral, esthetic, social, political, and religious expres sions and institutes of the civilized world has begotten them in spirit and in form, and carried them to its own unprecedented heights has had, (it is possible,) monas tics and ascetics, more numerous, more devout than the monks and priests of all previous creeds has swayed the ages with a breadth and rectitude tallying Nature's own has fashioned, systematized, and triumphantly fin ished and carried out, in its own interest, and with un paralleled success, a New Earth and a New Man. Thus we presume to write, as it were, upon things that exist not, and travel by maps yet unmade, and a blank. But the throes of birth are upon us ; and we have something of this advantage in seasons of strong formations, doubts, suspense for then the afflatus of such themes haply may fall upon us, more or less ; and then, hot from, surrounding war and revolution, our speech, though without polished coherence, and a fail ure by the standard called criticism, comes forth, real at least, as the lightnings. And may-be we, these days, have, too, our own re ward (for there are yet some, in all lands, worthy to be so encouraged.) Though not for us the joy of en tering at the last the conquered city nor ours the chance ever to see with our own eyes the peerless power and splendid eclat of the Democratic principle, arrived at meridian, filling the world with effulgence and majesty far beyond those of past history's kings, DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 35 or all dynastic sway there is yet, to whoever is eligible among us, the prophetic vision, the joy of being tossed in the brave turmoil of these times the promulgation and the path, obedient, lowly reverent to the voice, the gesture of the god, or holy ghost, which others see not, hear not with the proud consciousness that amid what ever clouds, seductions, or heart-wearying postpone ments, we have never deserted, never despaired, never abandoned the Faith. So much contributed, to be conned well, to help pre pare and brace our edifice, our plann'd Idea- we still proceed to give it in another of its aspects perhaps the main, the high fac/ade of all. For to Democracy, the leveler, the unyielding principle of the average, is surely joined another principle, equally unyielding, closely tracking the first, indispensable to it, opposite, (as the sexes are opposite,) and whose existence, con fronting arid ever modifying the other, often clashing, paradoxical, yet neither of highest avail without the other, plainly supplies to these grand cosmic politics of ours, and to the launched forth mortal dangers of Ee- publicanism, to-day or any day, the counterpart and offset, whereby Nature restrains the deadly original re- lentlessness of all her first-class laws. This second principle is Individuality, the pride and centripetal iso lation of a human being in himself, Identity Person- alism. Whatever the name, its acceptance and thorough infusion through the organizations of political common alty now shooting Aurora-like about the world, are of utmost importance, as the principle itself is needed for very life's sake. It forms, in a sort, or is to form, the compensating balance-wheel of the successful working machinery of aggregate America. And^if we think of it, what does civilization itself rest upon and what object has it, with its religions, arts, schools, &c., but rich, luxuriant, varied Personal- ism ? To that, all bends ; and it is because toward such result Democracy alone, on anything like Nature's scale, breaks up the limitless fallows of humankind, and plants 36 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. the seed, and gives fair play, that its claims now precede the rest. The Literature, Songs, Esthetics, &c., of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of Personality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thou sand effective ways.* As the topmost claim of a strong consolidating of the Nationality of These States, is, that only by such pow erful compaction can the separate States secure that full and free swing within their spheres, which is becoming to them, each after its kind, so will Individuality, with unimpeded branchings, nourish best under imperial Re publican forms. Assuming Democracy to be at present in its embryo * After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the field of Persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field have the great Poets and Literatuses signally toiled. They too, in all ages, all lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and women, as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold, shaped, bred by Orientalism, Feudalism, through their long growth and culmination, and breeding back in return, (When shall we have an equal series, typical of Democracy ?) Behold, commencing in primal Asia, (apparently formulated, in what beginning we know, in the gods of the mythologies, and coming down thence,) a few samples out of the countless product, bequeathed to the moderns, bequeathed to America as studies. For the men, Yudishtura, Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of the Old and New Testament characters ; Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Hercules, 2Eneas, St. John, Plutarch's heroes; the Merlin of Celtic bards, the Cid, Arthur and his knights, Siegfried and Hagen in the Niebelungen ; Roland and Oliver ; Roustam in the Shah-Nehmah ; and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern Faust. These, I say, are models, combined, adjusted to other standards than America's, but of priceless value to her and hers. Among women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek mythologies, certain Bible charactersrcspecially the Holy Mother ; Cleopatra, Penelope ; the portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in the Niebelungen ; Oriana, Una, &c. ; the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeanie and Effie Deans, &c., &c. (Woman, portrayed or outlined at her best, or as perfect human Mother, does not yet, it saems to me, fully appear in Literature.) DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 37 condition, and that the only large and satisfactory justi fication of it resides in the future, mainly through the copious production of perfect characters among the people, and through the advent of a sane and pervading Eeligiousness, it is with regard to the atmosphere and spaciousness fit for such characters, and of certain nutri ment and cartoon-draftings proper for them, and indi cating them, for New World purposes, that I continue the present statement an exploration, as of new ground, wherein, like other primitive surveyors, I must do the best I can, leaving it to those who come after me to do much better. The service, in fact, if any, must be to merely break a sort of first path or track, no matter how rude and ungeometrical. "We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwith standing the resonance and the many angry tempests, out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. It is, in some sort, younger brother of another great and often-used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten. As I perceive, the tendencies of our day, in The States, (and I entirely respect them,) are toward those vast and sweeping movements, influences, moral and physical, of humanity, now and always current over the planet, on the scale of the impulses of the elements. Then it is also good to reduce the whole matter to the considera tion of a single self, a man, a woman, on permanent grounds. Even for the treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or anything, sooner or later WG come down to one single, solitary Soul. There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought- that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of Identity yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spir itual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout 38 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre,) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminous- ness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and looked upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto not criticism by other stand ards, and adjustments thereto is the lesson of Nature. True, the full man wisely gathers, culls, absorbs ; but if, engaged disproportionately in that, he slights or overlays the precious idiocrasy and special nativity and intention that he is, the man's self, the main thing, is a failure, however wide his general cultivation. Thus, in our times, refinement and delicatesse are not only at tended to sufficiently, but threaten to eat us up, like a cancer. Already, the Democratic genius watches, ill- pleased, these tendencies. Provision for a little healthy rudeness, savage virtue, justification of what one has in one's self, whatever it is, is demanded. Negative quali ties, even deficiencies, would be a relief. Singleness and normal simplicity, and separation, amid this more and more complex, more and more artificialized, state of society how pensively we yearn for them ! how we would welcome their return ! In some such direction, then at any rate enough to preserve the balance we feel called' upon to throw what weight we can, not for absolute reasons, but cur rent ones. To prune, gather, trim, conform, and ever cram and stuff, is the pressure of our days. While aware that much can be said even in behalf of "all this, we perceive that we have not now to consider the ques tion of what is demanded to serve a half-starved and barbarous nation, or set of nations, but what is most applicable, most pertinent, for numerous congeries of conventional, over-corpulent societies already becoming stifled and rotten with flatulent, infidelislic literature, and polite conformity and art. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 39 In addition to established sciences, we suggest a science as it were of healthy average Personalism, on original-universal grounds, the object of which should be to raise up and supply through The States a copious race of superb American men and women, cheerful, re ligious, ahead of any yet known. America, leaving out her politics, has yet morally originated nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of" persons, books, manners, &c., appropriate for former conditions and for European hinds, are but exiles and exotics here. No current of her life, as shown on the surfaces of what is authoritatively called her So ciety, accepts or runs into moral, social, or esthetic De mocracy ; but all the currents set squarely against it. Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholstered Exterior Appearance anc[ show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside Acquisition never were Glibness, verbal Intellect, more the test, the emulation more loftily elevated as head and sample than they are on the surface of our Republican States this day. The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture. We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy. This word Culture, or what it has come to rep resent, involves, by contrast, our whole theme, and has been, indeed, the spur, urging us to engagement. Cer tain questions arise. As now taught, accepted and carried out, are not the processes of Culture rapidly creating a class of super cilious infidels, who believe in nothing? Shall a man lose himself in countless masses of adjustments, and be so shaped with reference to this, that, and the other, that the simply good and healthy and brave parts of him are reduced and clipped away, like the bordering of box in a garden ? You can cultivate corn and roses and orchards but who shall cultivate the primseval forests, the mountain peaks, the ocean, and the tum bling gorgcousness of the clouds? Lastly Is the readily-given reply that Culture only seeks to help, 40 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. systematize, and put in attitude, the elements of fer tility and power, a conclusive reply ? I do not so much object to the name, or word, but I should certainly insist, for the purposes of These States, on a radical change of category, in the distribution of precedence. I should demand a programme of Cul ture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the West, the working-men, the facts of farms and jackplanes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata, and with reference to the perfect equality of women, and of a grand and powerful motherhood. I should demand of this programme or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest human area. It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a typical Personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses. The best culture will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts, and loving perceptions, and of self-respect aiming to form, over this continent, an Idiocrasy of Universalism, which, true child of America, will bring joy to its mother, returning to her in her own spirit, recruiting myriads of men, able, natural, per ceptive, tolerant, devout, real men, alive and full, be lievers in her, America, and with some definite instinct why and for what she has arisen, most vast, most formi dable of historic births, and is, now and here, with won derful step, journeying through Time. The problem, as it seems to me, presented to the New World, is, under permanent law and order, and after preserving cohesion, (ensemble-Individuality,) at all hazards, to vitalize man's free play of special Per- sonalism, recognizing in it something that calls ever more to be considered, fed, and adopted as the substra tum for the best that belongs to us, (government indeed is for it,) including the new esthetics of our future. To formulate beyond this present vagueness to help line and put before us, the species, or a specimen of the DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 41 species, of the Democratic ethnology of the future, is a work toward which the Genius of our land, with pecu liar encouragement, invites her well-wishers. Already, certain limnings, more or less grotesque, more or less fading and watery, have appeared. We too, (repressing doubts and qualms,) will try our hand. Attempting then, however crudely, a basic model or portrait of Personality, for general use for the manli ness of The States, (and doubtless that is most useful which is most simple, comprehensive for all, and toned low enough,) we should prepare the canvas well before hand. Parentage must consider itself in advance. (Will the time hasten when fatherhood and mother hood shall become a science and the noblest science ?) To our model a clear-blooded, strong-fibred physique, is indispensable ; the questions of food, drink, air, exer cise, assimilation, digestion, can never be intermitted. Out of these we descry a well-begotten Selfhood in youth, fresh, ardent, emotional, aspiring, full of adven ture ; at maturity, brave, perceptive, under control, neither too talkative nor too reticent, neither flippant nor sombre ; of the bodily figure, the movements easy, the complexion showing the best blood, somewhat flushed, breast expanded, an erect attitude, a voice whose sound outvies music, eyes of calm and steady gaze, yet cap'able also of flashing and a general pres ence that holds its own in the company of the highest. For it is native Personality, and that alone, that endows a man to stand before Presidents or Generals, or in any distinguished collection, with aplomb ; and not Culture, or any knowledge or intellect whatever. With regard to the mental-educational part of our model, enlargement of intellect, stores of cephalic knowledge, &c., the concentration thitherward of all the customs of our age, especially in America, is so overweening, and provides so fully for that part, that, important and necessary as it is, it really needs nothing from us here except, indeed, a phrase of warning and restraint. Manners, costumes, too, though important, we need not dwell upon here. Like beauty, grace of motion, 42 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. &c., they are results. Causes, original things, being attended to, the right manners unerringly follow. Much is said, among artists, of the grand style, as if it were a thing by itself. When a man, artist or whoever, has health, pride, acuteness, noble aspirations, he has the motive-elements of the grandest style. The rest is but manipulation, (yet that is no small matter.) Leaving still unspecified several sterling parts of any model fit for the future Personality of America, I must not fail, again and ever, to pronounce myself on one, probably the least attended to in modern times a hiatus, indeed, threatening its gloomiest consequences after us. I mean the simple, unsophisticated Conscience, the primary moral element. If I were asked to specify in what quarter lie the grounds of darkest dread, re specting the America of our hopes, I should have to point to this particular. I should demand the invaria ble application to individuality, this day, and any day, of that old, ever-true plumb-rule of persons, eras, na tions. Our triumphant modern Civilizee, with his all- schooling and his wondrous appliances, will still show himself but an amputation while this deficiency remains. Beyond, (assuming a more hopeful tone,) the verte- bration of the manly and womanly Personalism of our Western World, can only be, and is, indeed, to be, (I hope,) its all penetrating Eeligiousness. The architec ture of Individuality will ever prove various, with count less different combinations ; but here they rise as into common pinnacles, some higher, some less high, only all pointing upward. Indeed, the ripeness of Eeligion is doubtless to be looked for in this field of Individuality, and is a result that no organization or church can ever achieve. As history is poorly retained by what the technists call his tory, and is not given out from their pages, except the learner has in himself the sense of the well-wrapt, never yet written, perhaps impossible to be written, history so Religion, although casually arrested, and, after a fashion, preserved in the churches and creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 43 Soul, which, when greatest, knows not Bibles in the old way, but in new ways the identified Soul, which can really confront Keligion when it extricates itself entirely from the churches, and not before. Personalism fuses this, and favors it. I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of Individuality may the spirituality of Be- ligion positively come forth at all. Only here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight. Only here, communion with the mys teries, the eternal problems, Whence ? whither ? Alone, and identity, and the mood and the Soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like va pors. Alone, and silent thought, and awe, and aspira tion and then the interior consciousness, like a hith erto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its wondrous lines to the sense. Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless' operation of one's isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable. To practically enter into Politics is an important part of American personalism. To every young man, North and South, earnestly studying these things, I should here, as an offset to what I have said in former pages, now also say, that may-be to views of very largest scope, after all, perhaps the political, (and perhaps lit erary and sociological,) America goes best about its development its own way sometimes, to temporary sight, appalling enough. It is the fashion among dil- lettants and fops to decry the whole formulation and personnel of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See you that you do -not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very well, upon the whole, notwith standing these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, and the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers. It is the dillettants, and all' who shirk their duty, who are not doing well. As for you, I advise you to enter more 44 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. strongly yet into politics. I advise every young man to do so. Always inform yourself ; always do the best you can ; always vote. Disengage yourself from parties. They have been useful, and to some extent remain so ; but the floating, uncommitted electors, farmers, clerks, mechanics, the masters of parties watching aloof, in clining victory this side or that side such are the ones most needed, present and future. For America, if eligi ble at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without ; for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less toler ant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself im plicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dic tators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them. So much, (hastily tossed together, and leaving far more unsaid,) for an ideal, or intimations of an ideal, toward American manhood. But the other sex, in our land, requires at least a basis of suggestion. I have seen a young American woman, one of a large family of daughters, who, some years since, migrated from her meagre country home to one of the northern cities, to gain her own support. She soon became an expert seamstress, but finding the employment too con fining for her health and comfort, she went boldly to work, for others, to house-keep, cook, clean, &c. After trying several places, she fell upon one where she was suited. She has told me that she finds nothing de grading in her position ; it is not inconsistent with personal dignity, self-respect, and the respect of others. She confers benefits and receives them. She has good health ; her presence itself is healthy and bracing ; her character is unstained ; she has made herself under stood, and preserves her jndependence, and has been able to help her parents and educate and get places for her sisters ; and her course of life is not without oppor- DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 45 tunities for mental improvement, and of much quiet, uncosting happiness and love. I have seen another woman who, from taste and ne cessity conjoined, has gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business, partly works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life, is not abashed by the coarseness of the contact, knows how to be firm and silent at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness and decorum, and will com pare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers. For all that, she has not lost the charm of the womanly nature, but preserves and bears it fully, though through such rugged pre sentation. Then there is the wife of a mechanic, mother of two children, a woman of merely passable English educa tion, but of fine wit, with all her sex's grace and intui tions, who exhibits, indeed, such a noble female Person ality, that I am fain to record it here. Never abnegating her own proper independence, but always genially pre serving it, and what belongs to it cooking, washing, child-nursing, house-tending, she beams sunshine out of all these duties, and makes them illustrious. Physi ologically sweet and sound, loving \vork. practical, she yet knows that there are intervals, however few, devoted to recreation, music, leisure, hospitality and affords such intervals. Whatever she does, and wherever she is, that charm, that indescribable perfume of genuine womanhood, attends her, goes with her, exhales from her, which belongs of right to all the sex, and is, or ought to be, the invariable atmosphere and common aureola of old as well as young. My mother has described to me a resplendent person, down on Long Island, whom she knew years ago, in early days. She was known by the name of the Peace maker. She was well toward eighty years old, of happy and sunny temperament, had always lived on a farm, was very neighborly, sensible and discreet, an invari able and welcomed favorite, especially with young mar ried women. She had numerous children and grand children. She was uneducated, but possessed a native 46 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. dignity. She had come to be a tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of difficulties, shep herdess, and reconciler in the land. She was a sight to draw near and look upon, with her large figure, her profuse snow-white hair, dark eyes, clear complexion, sweet breath, and peculiar personal magnetism. The foregoing portraits, I admit, are frightfully out of line from these imported models of womanly Per sonality the stock feminine characters of the current novelists, or of the foreign court poems, (Ophelias, Enids, Princesses, or Ladies of one thing or another,) which fill the envying dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted by our young men, too, as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought after. But I present mine just for a change. Then there are mutterings, (w r e will not now stop to heed them here, but they must be heeded,) of some thing more revolutionary. ' The day is coming when the deep questions of woman's entrance amid the arenas of practical life, politics, trades, &c., will not only be ar gued all around us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment. Of course, in These States, for both man and woman, we must entirely recast the types of highest Personality from what the Oriental, Feudal, Ecclesias tical worlds bequeath us, and which yet fully possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and melodramatic, not without use as studies, tut making sad work, and forming a strange anachron ism upon the scenes and exigencies around us. Of course, the old, undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new combina tions, pur own days. Nor is this so incredible. I can conceive a community, to-day and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect Personalities, without noise, meet ; say in some pleasant Western settlement or town, where a couple of hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by luck been drawn to gether, with nothing extra of genius or wealth, but vir tuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly, DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 47 and devout. I can conceive such a community organ ized in running order, powers judiciously delegated, farming, building, trade, courts, mails, schools, elec tions, all attended to ; and then the rest of life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each individual, and bearing golden fruit. I can see there, in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true Personality, developed, exer cised proportionately in body, mind, and spirit. I can imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or difficult, but in buoyant accordance with the municipal and gen eral requirements of our times. And I can realize in it the culmination of something better than any stereo typed eclat of history or poems. Perhaps, unsung, un- dramatized, unput in essays or biographies perhaps even some such community already exists, in Ohio, Illi nois, Missouri, or somewhere, practically fulfilling itself, and thus outvying, in cheapest vulgar life, all that has been hitherto shown in best ideal pictures. In > short, and to sum up, America, betaking herself to formative action, (as it is about time for more solid achievement and less windy promise,) must, for her purposes, cease to recognize a theory of character grown of Feudal .aristocracies, or formed by merely esthetic or literary standards, or from any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture, polish, caste, &c., and must sternly promulgate her own new standard, yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial, ele ments, and combining them into groups, unities, appro priate to the modern, the democratic, the West, and to the practical occasions and needs of our own cities, and of the agricultural regions. Ever the most precious in the common. Ever the fresh breeze of field, or hill, or lake, is more than any palpitation of fans, though of ivory, and redolent with perfume ; and the air is more than the costliest perfumes. And now, for fear of mistake, we may not intermit to beg our absolution from all that genuinely is, or goes along with, even Culture. Pardon us, venerable shade ! if we have seemed to speak lightly of your office. The whole civilization of the earth, we know, is yours, with 48 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. all the glory and the light thereof. It is, indeed, in your own spirit, and seeking to tally the loftiest teach ings of it, that we aim these poor utterances. For you, too, mighty minister! know that there is something greater than you, namely, the fresh, eternal qualities of Being. From them, and by them, as you, at your best, we, too, after our fashion, when art and conventions fail, evoke the last, the needed help, to vitalize our country and our days. Thus we pronounce not so much against the principle of Culture ; we only supervise it, and promulge along with it, as deep, perhaps a deeper, principle. As we have shown, the New World, including in itself the all- leveling aggregate of Democracy, we show it also in cluding the all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of Individuality, and erecting therefor a lofty and hith erto unoccupied framework or platform, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer and mechanic to the female equally with the male a towering Selfhood, not physically perfect only not satisfied with the mere mind's and learning's stores, but Religious, possessing the idea of the Infinite, (rudder and compass sure amid this troublous voyage, o'er darkest, wildest wave, through stormiest wind, of man's or nation's progress,) realizing, above the rest, that known humanity, in deepest sense, is fair adhesion to Itself, for purposes beyond and that, finally, the Personality of mortal life is most important with reference to the immortal, the Unknown, the Spiritual, the only permanently real, which, as the ocean waits for and receives the rivers, waits for us each and all. Much is there, yet, demanding line and outline in our Vistas, not only on these topics, but others quite un written. Indeed, we could talk the matter, and expand it, through lifetime. But it is necessary to return to our original premises. In view of them, we have again pointedly to confess that all the objective grandeurs of the World, for highest purposes, yield themselves up, and depend on mentality alone. Here, and here only, all balances, all rests. For the mind, which alone builds DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 49 the permanent edifice, haughtily builds it to itself. By it, with what follows it, are conveyed to mortal sense the culminations of the materialistic, the known, and a prophecy of the unknown. To take expression, to in carnate, to endow a Literature with grand and arche typal models to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and to achieve spiritual meanings, and sug gest the future these, and these only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real materials ; but the wise know that they do not become real till touched by emotions, the mind. Did we call the latter impon derable ? Ah, let us rather proclaim that the slightest song- tune, the countless ephemera of passions aroused by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the granite blocks in their foundations. Approaching thus the momentous spaces, and con sidering with reference to a new and greater Personal- ism, the needs and possibilities of American imaginative literature, through the medium-light of what we have already broached, it will at once be appreciated that a vast gulf of difference separates the present accepted condition of these spaces, inclusive of what is floating in them, from any condition adjusted to, or fit for, the world, the America, there sought to be indicated, and the copious races of complete men -and women, down along these Vistas crudely outlined. It is, in some sort, no less a difference than lies be tween that long-continued nebular state and vagueness of the astronomical worlds, compared with the subse quent state, the definitely-formed worlds themselves, duly compacted, clustering in systems, hung up there, chandeliers of the universe, beholding and mutually lit by each other's lights, serving for ground of all sub* stantial foothold, all vulgar uses yet serving still more r,s an undying chain and echelon of spiritual proofs and shows. A boundless field to fill ! A new Creation, with needed orbic works launched forth, to revolve in free and lawful circuits to move, self-poised, through the ether, and shine, like heaven's own suns! With such, and nothing less, we suggest that New World Litera- 50 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. ture, fit to rise upon, cohere, and signalize, in time, These States. "What, however, do we more definitely mean by New AVorld Literature ? Are we not doing well enough here already? Are not the United States this day busily using, working, more printer's type, more presses, than any other country ? uttering and absorbing more publi cations than any other? Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper ? (helping themselves, under shelter of a delusive and sneaking law, or rather absence of law, to most of their forage, poetical, pictorial, histori cal, romantic, even comic, without money and without price and fiercely resisting even the timidest proposal to pay for it.) Many will come under this delusion but my purpose is to dispel it. I say that a nation may hold and circu late rivers and oceans of very readable print, journals, magazines, novels, library-books, "poetry," &c. such as The States to-day possess and circulate of unques tionable aid and value hundreds of new volumes an nually composed and brought out here, respectable enough, indeed unsurpassed in smartness and erudi tion with further hundreds, or rather millions, (as by free forage, or theft, aforementioned,,) also thrown into the market, And yet, all the while, the said nation, land, strictly speaking, may possess no literature at all. Repeating our inquiry, What, then, do we mean by real literature? especially, the American literature of the future ? Hard questions to meet. The clues are inferential, and turn us to the past. At best, we can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits. It must still be reiterated, as, for the purpose of these Memoranda, the deep lesson of History and Time, that all else in the contributions of a nation or age, through its politics, materials, heroic personalities, mili tary eclat, &c., remains crude, and defers, in any close and thorough-going estimate, until vitalized by national, original archetypes in literature. They only put the nation in form, finally tell anything, prove, complete anything perpetuate anything. Without doubt, some DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 51 of the richest and most powerful and populous commu nities of the antique world, and some of the grandest personalities and events, have, to after and present times, left themselves entirely unbequeathed. Doubt less, greater than any that have come down to us, were among those lands, heroisms, persons, that have not come down to us at all, even by name, date, or location. Others have arrived safely, as from voyages over wide, centuries-stretching seas. The little ships, the miracles that have buoyed them, and by incredible chances safely conveyed them, (or the best of them, their meaning and essence,) over long wastes, darkness, lethargy, igno rance, &c., have been a few inscriptions a few im mortal compositions, small in size, yet compassing what measureless values of reminiscence, contemporary por traitures, manners, idioms and beliefs, with deepest in ference, hint and thought, to tie and touch forever the old, new body, and the old, new soul. These ! and still these ! bearing the freight so dear dearer than pride dearer than love. All the best experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here ! Some of these tiny ships we call Old and New Testament, Homer, Eschylus, Plato, Juvenal, &c. Precious minims ! I think, if we were forced to choose, rather than have you, and the likes of you, and what belongs to, and has grown of you, blotted out and gone, we could better afford, ap palling as that would be, to lose all actual ships, this day fastened by wharf, or floating on wave, and see them, with all their cargoes, scuttled and sent to the bottom. Gathered by geniuses of city, race, or age, and put by them in highest of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the peculiar combinations, and the outshows of that city, age, or race, its particular modes of the universal attrir butes and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods, wars, traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys, (or the subtle spirit of these,) having been passed on to us to illumine our own selfhood, and its experiences what they supply, indispensable and highest, if taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless store-houses could make up to us, or ever again return. 52 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. For us, along the great highways of time, those monu ments stand those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the nights. Un known Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs ; Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic ; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flashes of lightning, conscience, like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of ven geance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove ; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and esthetic propor tion ; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex ; of the figures, some far-off and veiled, others nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh ; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians ; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will ; and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and view them as orbs and systems of orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic in tellect, the Soul? Ye powerful and resplendent ones ! ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal and the old while our genius is Demo cratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils not to enslave us, as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own perhaps, (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you yourselves have left ! On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional, un compromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west ! By points and specimens like these we, in reflection, token what we mean by any land's or people's genuine DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 53 literature. And thus compared and tested, judging amid the influence of loftiest products only, what do our current copious fields of print, covering, in mani fold forms, the United States, better, for an analogy, present, than, as in certain regions of the sea, those spreading, undulating masses of squid, through which the whale, swimming with head half out, feeds ? Not but that doubtless our current so-called litera ture, (like an endless supply of small coin,) performs a certain service, and may-be, too, the service needed for the time, (the preparation service, as children learn to spell.) Everybody reads, and truly nearly everybody writes, either books, or for the magazines or journals. The matter has magnitude, too, after a sort. There is something impressive about the huge editions of the dailies, and weeklies, the mountain-stacks of whits paper piled in the press-vaults, and the proud, crashing, ten- cylinder presses, which I can stand and watch any time by the half hour. Then, (though The States in the field of Imagination present not a single first-class work, not a single great Literafcus,) the main objects, to amuse, to titillate, to pass away time, to circulate the news and rumors of news, to rhyme and read rhyme, are yet at tained, and on a scale of infinity. To-day, in books, in the rivalry of writers, especially novelists, success, (so- called,) is for him or her who strikes the mean flat aver age, the sensational appetite for stimulus, incident, &c., and depicts, to the common calibre, sensual, exterior life. To such, or the luckiest of them, as we see, the audiences are limitless and profitable ; but they cease presently. While, this day or any day, to workmen, portraying interior or spiritual life, the audiences were limited, and often laggard but they last forever. Compared with the past, our modern science soars, and our journals serve ; but ideal and even ordinary romantic literature does not, I think, substantially ad vance. Behold the prolific brood of the contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c. The same end less thread of tangled and superlative love-story, in herited, apparently, from the Amadises and Palmerins of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries over there in Eu- 54 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. rope. The costumes and associations are brought down to date, the seasoning is hotter and more varied, the dragons and ogres are left out but the thing, I should say, has not advanced is just as sensational, just as strained remains about the same, nor more, nor less. What is the reason, our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity,, of our own the Mis sissippi, stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our literature ? especially the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a Earcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen :om abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation, or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after an other, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions, and stormiest passions of history, are cross ing to-day with unparalleled rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offer ing new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of concep tions in Literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving Art in its highest, (which is only the other name for serving God, and serving Humanity,) where is the man of letters, where is the book, with any nobler aim than to follow in the old track, repeat what has been said before and, as its utmost triumph, sell well, and be erudite or elegant ? Mark the roads, the processes, through which These States have arrived, standing easy, ever-equal, ever- compact, in their range, to-day. European adven tures? the most antique? Asiatic or African? old history miracles romances ? Bather, our own un questioned facts. They hasten, incredible, blazing bright as fire. From the deeds and days of Columbus down to the present, and including the present and especially the late Secession war when I con them, I feel, every leaf, like stopping to see if I have not made DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 55 a mistake, and fallen upon the splendid figments of some dreara. But it is no dream. We stand, live, move, in the huge flow of our age's materialism in its spirituality. We have had founded for us the most positive of lands. The founders have passed to other spheres But what are these terrible duties they have left us ? Their politics the United States have, in my opinion, with all their faults, already substantially established, for good, on their own native, sound, long-vista'd prin ciples, never to be overturned, offering^ sure basis for all the rest. With that, their future religious forms, sociology, literature, teachers, schools, costumes, &ci, are of course to make a compact whole, uniform, on tallying principles. For how can we remain, divided, contradicting ourselves, this way ? * I say we can only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble, and the ethic purports, and faithfully building upon them. For the New World, indeed, after two grand stages of preparation-strata, I perceive that now, a third stage, being ready for, (and without which the other two were useless,) with unmistakable signs appears. The First Stage was the planning and putting on record the po litical foundation rights of immense masses of people indeed all people in the organization of Republican National, State, and Municipal governments, all con structed with reference to each, and each to all. This is the American programme, not for classes, but for universal man, and is embodied in the compacts of the * Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its) Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world a Sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrenched, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, supersti tious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of hu manity. 56 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. Declaration of Independence, and, as it began and has now grown, with its amendments, the Federal Consti tution and in the State governments, with all their interiors, and with general suffrage ; those having the sense not only of what is in themselves, but that their certain several things started, planted, hundreds of others, in the same direction, duty arise and follow. The Second Stage relates to material prosperity, wealth, produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and continental railways, intercommunication and trade with all lands, steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great cities, cheap appliances for com fort, numberless technical schools, books, newspapers, a currency for money circulation, &c. The Third Stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make them and all illustrious, I, now, for one, promulge, announcing a na tive Expression Spirit, getting into form, adult, and through mentality, for These States, self-contained, dif ferent from others, more expansive, more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, male and female, traversing the States, none excepted and by native superber tableaux and growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures, architecture and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off sur faces, and from its own interior and vital principles, entirely reconstructing Society. For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in Man above all his errors and wickedness few suspect how deep, how deep it really strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently sup posed so too, that The States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an elective government to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and become a nation of prac tical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and well-off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the tasks of America ; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive concep tion, but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress. Daughter of a physical revolution Mother of the true revolutions, which are DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 57 of the interior life, and of the arts. For so long as the spirit is not changed, any change of appearance is of 110 avail. The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American Independence. What is independ ence ? Freedom from ail laws or bonds except those of one's own being, controlled by the universal ones. To lands, to man, to woman, what is there at last to each, but the inherent soul, nativity, idiocrasy, free, highest- poised, soaring its own flight, following out itself ? At present, These States, in their theology and so cial standards, &c., (of greater importance than their political institutions,) are entirely held possession of by foreign lands. We see the sons and daughters 01 the. New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, and the dead. We see London, Paris, Italy not original, superb, as where they be long but second-hand here where they do not belong. We see the shreds of Hebrews, Konaans, Greeks ; but where, on her own soil, do we see, in any faithful, high est, proud expression, America herself? I sometimes question whether she has a corner in her own house. Not but that in one sense, and a very grand one, good theology, good Art, or good Literature, has certain fea tures shared in common. The combination fraternizes, ties the races is, in many particulars, under laws appli cable indifferently to all, irrespective of climate or date, and, from whatever source, appeals to emotions, pride, love, spirituality, common to humankind. Neverthe less, they touch a man closest, (perhaps only actually touch him,) even in these, in their expression through autochthonic lights and shades, flavors, fondnesses, aversions, specific incidents, illustrations, out of his own nationality, geography, surroundings, antecedents, c. The spirit and the form are one, and depend far more on association, identity and place, than is supposed. Subtly interwoven with the materiality and personality of a land, a race Teuton, Turk, Californian, or what not there is always something I can hardly tell what 58 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. it is, History but describes the results of it, it is the same as the uritellable look of some human faces. Na ture, too, in her stolid forms, is full of it but to most it is there a secret. This something is rooted in the in- yisible roots, the profoundest meanings of that place, race, or nationality ; and to absorb and again effuse it, uttering words and products as from its midst, and car rying it into highest regions, is the work, or a main part of the work, of any country's true author, poet, histo rian, lecturer, and perhaps even priest and pliilosoph. Here, and here only, are the foundations for our really valuable and permanent verse, drama, &c. But at present, (judged by any higher scale than that which finds the chief ends of existence to be to fever ishly make money during one-half of it, and by some "amusement," or perhaps foreign travel, flippantly kill time, the other half,) and considered with reference to purposes of patriotism, health, a noble Personality, re ligion, and the democratic adjustments, all these swarms of poems, dramatic plays, resultant so far from Ameri can intellect, and the formulation of our best ideas, are useless and a mockery. They strengthen and nourish no one, express nothing characteristic, give decision and purpose to no one, and suffice only the lowest level of vacant minds. Of the question, indeed, of what is called the Drama, or dramatic presentation in the United States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should say it deserves to be treated with the same gravity, and on a par with the questions of ornamental confectionery at public dinners, or the arrangement of curtains and hangings in a ball room nor more, nor less. Of the other, I will not insult the reader's intelli gence, (once really entering into the atmosphere of these Vistas,) by supposing it necessary to show, in de tail, why the copious dribble, either of our little or well- known rhymesters, does not fulfil, in any respect, the needs and august occasions of this land. America de mands a Poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surround ing and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no re spect ignore science or the modern, but i aspire itself DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 59 with, science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest models of tha past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself and products out of its own origi nal spirit only. Like her, it must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards, the banner of the divine pride of man in himself, (the radical foundation of the new religion.) Long enough have the People been listening to poems in which common Humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging superiors. But America listens to no such poems. Erect, inflated, and fully self- esteeming be the chant ; and then America will listen with pleased ears. Nor may the genuine gold, the gems, when brought to light at last, be probably ushered forth from any of the quarters currently counted on. To-day, doubtless, the infant Genius of American poetic expression, (elud ing those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes, and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia publishers causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not to chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artifi cial gossamer delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjured by the coteries, the art- writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges lies sleeping, aside, unreck- ing itself, in some Western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, or stump-speech or in Ken tucky or Georgia or the Carolinas or in some slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Phila delphia or Baltimore mechanic or up in the Maine woods or off in the hut of the California miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along the Pacific rail road or on the breasts of the young farmers of tide Northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes. Rude and coarse nursing-beds these ; but only from such be ginnings and stocks, indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time, flowers of genuine Amer ican aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own. I say it were a standing disgrace 'to These States i 60 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. I say it were a disgrace to any nation, distinguished above others by the variety and vastness of its territo ries, its materials, its inventive activity, and the splendid practicality of its people, not to rise and soar^above others also in its original styles in literature and art, and its own supply of intellectual and esthetic master pieces, archetypal, and consistent with itself. I know not a land except ours that has not, to some extent, however small, made its title clear. The Scotch have their born ballads, tunes subtly expressing their past and present, and expressing character. The Irish have theirs. England, Italy, France, Spain, theirs. What has America? With exhaustless mines of the richest ore of epic, lyric, tale, tune, picture, &c., in the Four Years' War ; with, indeed, I sometimes think, the richest masses of material ever afforded a nation, more varie gated, and on a larger scale the first sign of propor tionate, native, imaginative Soul, and first-class works to match, is, (I cannot too often repeat,) so far wanting. Long ere the Second Centennial arrives, there will be some Forty to Fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba. The population will be sixty or sev enty millions. The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be -daily electric communica tion with every part of the globe. What an age ! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The Indi viduality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be ? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the mightiest original non-subordinated SOUL has ever really, gloriously led, or ever can lead. (This Soul its other name, in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.) In fond fancy leaping those hundred years ahead, let us survey America's works, poems, philosophies, fulfill ing prophecies, and giving form and decision to best ideals. Much that is now undreamed of, we might then perhaps see established, luxuriantly cropping forth, rich ness, vigor of letters and of artistic expression, in whose products character will be a main requirement, and not merely erudition or elegance. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 61 Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly developed, cultivated and recognized in manners and Literature, the most sub stantial hope and safety of the future of These States, will then be fully expressed.* A strong-fibred Joyousness, and Faith, and the sense of Health al fresco, may well enter into the preparation of future noble American authorship. Part of the test of a great Literatus shall be the absence in him of the idea of the covert, the artificial, the lurid, the malefi cent, the devil, the grim estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity, and the like. The great Literatus will be known, among the rest, by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the ab sence in him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strained and temporary fashion. Nor must I fail, again and yet again, to clinch, reit erate more plainly still, (O that indeed such survey as we fancy, may show in time this part completed also!) the lofty aim, surely the proudest and the purest, in whose service the future Literatus, of whatever field, may gladly labor. As we have intimated, offsetting the * It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American Democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences ; but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pare and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedently emo tional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having deepest relations to general politics. I say Democracy infers such loving comrade ship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating it self. 62 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. material civilization of our race, our Nationality, its wealth, territories, factories, population, luxuries, pro ducts, trade, and military and naval strength, and breathing breath of life into all these, and more, must be its Moral Civilization the formulation, expression, and aidancy whereof, is the very highest height of lit erature. And still within this wheel, revolves another wheel. The climax of this loftiest range of modern civilization, giving finish and hue, and rising above all the gorgeous shows and results of wealth, intellect, power, and art, as such above even theology and reli gious fervor is to be its development, from the eternal bases, and the fit expression, of absolute Conscience, moral soundness, Justice. I say there is nothing else higher, for Nation, Individual, or for Literature, than the idea, and practical realization and expression of the idea, of Conscience, kept at topmost mark, absolute in itself, well cultivated, uncontaminated by the manifold weeds, the cheats, changes, and vulgarities of the fash ions of the world. Even in religious fervor there is a touch of animal heat. But moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw, not Godlike only, entirely Human, awes and enchants nie forever. Great is emo tional Love, even in the order of the rational universe. But, if we must make gradations, I am clear there is something greater. Power, love, veneration, products, genius, esthetics, tried by subtlest comparisons, analyses, and in serenest moods, somewhere fail, somehow be come vain. Then noiseless, with flowing steps, the lord, the sun, the last Ideal comes. By the names Bight, Justice, Truth, we suggest, but do not describe it. To the world of men it remains a dream, an idea as they call it. Biit no dream is it to the wise but the proud est, almost only solid lasting thing of all. I say, again and forever, the triumph of America's democratic formules is to be the inauguration, growth, acceptance, and unmistakable supremacy among indi viduals, cities, States, and the Nation, of moral Con science. Its analogy in the material universe is what holds together this world, and every object upon it, and carries its dynamics on forever sure and safe. Its lack, DEHOCEATIC VISTAS. 63 and the persistent shirking of it, as in life, sociology, literature, politics, business, and even sermonizing, these times, or any times, still leaves the abysm, the mortal flaw and smutch, mocking civilization to-day, with all its unquestioned triumphs, and all the civilization so far known. Such is the thought I would especially be queath to any earnest persons, students of these Vistas, and following after me.* Present Literature, while magnificently fulfilling cer tain popular demands, with plenteous knowledge and verbal smartness, is profoundly sophisticated, insane, and its very joy is morbid. It needs retain the knowl edge, and fulfil the demands, but needs to purge itself ; or rather needs to be born again, become unsophisti cated, and become sane. It needs tally and express Nature, and the spirit of Nature, and to know and obey the standards. I say the question of Nature, largely considered, involves the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious and involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right condi- '"" I am reminded as I write that out of this very Conscience, or idea of Conscience, of intense moral right, and in its name and strained construction, the worst fanaticisms, wars, persecutions, murders, &c., have yet, in all lands, been broached, and have come to their devilish fruition. Much is to be said but I may say here, and in response, that side by side with the unflagging stimu lation of the elements of Religion and Conscience must henceforth move with equal sway, science, absolute reason, and the general proportionate development of the whole man. These scientific facts, deductions, are divine too precious counted parts of moral civilization, and, with physical health, indispensable to it, to pre vent fanaticism. For Abstract; Religion, I perceive, is easily led astray, ever credulous, and is capable of devouring, remorseless, like fire and flame. Conscience, too, isolated from all else, and from the emotional nature, may but attain the beauty and purity of glacial, snowy ice. We want, for These States, for the general character, a cheerful, religious fervor, enhued with the ever-present modifications of the human emotions, friendship, benevolence^ with a fair field for scientific inquiry, the right of individual judgment, and always the cooling influences of material Nature. We want not again either the religious fervor of the Spanish In quisition, nor the morality of the New England Puritans. 64 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. tions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, ac tivity, and development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to live and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of Life itself, discover and achieve happiness with Beirg suffused night and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth, amuse ment, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art, can give. In the prophetic literature of These States, Nature, true Nature, and the true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all, become fully restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading atmosphere to poems, and the test of all high literary and esthetic compositions. I do not mean the smooth walks, trimm'd hedges, but terflies, poseys and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole Orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons. Furthermore, as by what we now partially call Nature is intended, at most, only what is entertainable by the physical conscience, the lessons of the esthetic, the sense of matter, and of good animal health on these it must be distinctly accumulated, incorporated, that man, comprehending these, has, in towering super- addition, the Moral and Spiritual Consciences, indi cating his destination beyond the ostensible, the mortal. To the heights of such estimate of Nature indeed ascending, we proceed to make observations for our Vistas, breathing rarest air. What is I believe called Idealism seems to me to suggest, (guarding against ex travagance, and ever modified even by its opposite,) the course of inquiry and desert of favor for our New World metaphysics, their foundation of and in literature, giv ing hue to all.* * The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in Metaphysics, including- the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the mind of man has brought up here and always will. DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 65 The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the Unknown and of Unreality must be brought forward with au- Here, at least, of whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause, too, is unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in this field though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage, or royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great Olympic games will be dearest to humanity, and their works, however esthetically defec tive, will be treasured forever. The altitude of literature and poetry has always been Religion and always will be. The In dian Vedas, the Nac.kas of Zoroaster, The Talmud of the Jews, the Old Testament also, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato's works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro, and so on toward our own day, to Swedenborg, and to the invaluable contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel, these, with such poems only in which, (while singing well of persons and events, of the passions of man, and the shows of the material universe,) the religious tone, the consciousness of mystery, the recognition of the future, of the unknown, of Deity, over and under all, and of the divine purpose, are never absent, but indirectly give tone to all exhibit literature's real heights and elevations, towering up like the great mountains of the earth. Standing on this ground the last, the highest, only permanent ground and sternly criticising, from it, all works, either of the literary, or any Art, we have peremptorily to dismiss every pre- tensive production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which violates, or ignores, or even does not celebrate, the central Divine Idea of All, suffusing universe, of eternal trains of purpose, in the development, by however slow degrees, of the physical, moral, and spiritual Kosmos. I say he has studied, meditated to no profit, whatever may be his mere erudition, who has not ab sorbed this simple consciousness and faith. It is not entirely new but it is for America to elaborate it, and look to build upon and expand from it, with uncompromising reliance. Above the doors of teaching the inscription is to appear, Though little or nothing can be absolutely known, perceived, except from a point of view which is evanescent, yet we know at least one perma nency, that Time and Space, in the will of God, furnish successive chains,* completions of material births and beginnings, solve all discrepancies, fears and doubts, and eventually fulfil happiness and that the prophecy of those births, namely Spiritual results, throws the true arch over all teaching, all science. The local considerations of sin, disease, deformity, ignorance, death, &c., and their measurement by superficial mind, and ordinary legisla tion and theology, are to be met by Science, boldly accepting, promulging this faith, and planting the seeds of superber laws of the explication of the physical universe through the spiritual and clearing the way for a Religion, sweet and unimpugnable alike to little child or great savan. 66 EEMOCEATIC VISTAS. thority, as they are tho legitimate heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents. Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our stand, Q-J.T ground,^ and never desert it, to confront the growing excess and arrogance of Realism. To the cry, now victorious the cry of Ssnse, science, flesh, in comes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect, demonstra tions, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and iron, or even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, &c., fear not my brethren, my sisters, to sound out with equally ' determined voice, that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envisioned soul Illusions! apparitions! figments all! True, we must not condemn the s t how, neither absolutely deny it, for the in dispensa bility of its meanings ; but how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we can already conceive of su perior and spiritual points of view, and, palpable as it seems under present relations, it all and several might, nay certainly would, fall apart and vanish. I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the busi ness materialism of the current age, Our States. But wo to the age or land in which these things, movements, stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas. As fuel to ilame, and flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science, materialism, unerringly feed the highest mind, the soul. Infinitude the flight : fathomless the mystery. Man, so diminutive, . dilates beyond the sensible uni verse, competes with, outcopes Space and Time, medi tating even one great idea. Thus, and thus only, does a human being, his spirit, ascend above, and justify, objective Nature, which, probably nothing in itself, is incredibly and divinely serviceable, indispensable, real, here. And as the purport of objective Nature is doubt less folded, hidden, somewhere here As somewhere here is what this globe and its manifold forms, and the light of day, and night's darkness, and life itself, with all its experiences, are for it is here the great Litera ture, especially verse, must get its inspiration and throb bing blood. Then may we attain -to a poetry worthy DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 67 the immortal soul of man, and which while absorbing materials, and, in their own sense, the shows of Nature, will, above all, have, both directly and indirectly, a free ing, fluidizing, expanding, religious character, exulting with science, fructifying the moral elements, and stimu lating aspirations, and meditations on the unknown. The process, so far, is indirect and peculiar, and though it may be suggested, cannot be denned. Ob serving, rapport, and with intuition, the shows and forms presented by Nature, the sensuous luxuriance, the beautiful in living men and women, the actual play of passions, in history and life and, above all, from those developments either in Nature or human person ality in which power, (dearest of all to the sense of the artist,) transacts itself Out of these, and seizing what .is in them, the poet, the esthetic worker in any field, by the divine magic of his genius, projects them, their analogies, by curious removes, 'indirections, in Litera ture and Art. (No useless attempt to repeat the mate rial creation, by daguerreo typing the exact likeness by mortal mental means.) This is the image-making fac ulty, coping with material creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it. This alone, when all the other parts of a specimen of literature or art are ready and waiting, can breathe into it the breath of life, and endow it with Identity. "The true question to ask," says the Librarian of Congress in a paper read before the Social Science Convention at New York, October, 1869, "The true question to ask respecting a book, is, Has it helped any human Soul ?" This is the hint, statement, not only of the great Literatus, his book, but of every great Artist. It may be that all works of art are to be first tried by their art qualities, their image-forming talent, and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing, euphonious and other talents. Then, whenever claiming to be first-class works, they are to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in, and radiation, in the highest sense, and always indirectly, of the ethic principles, and eligibility to free, arouse, dilate. As within the purposes of the Kosmos, and vivifying 68 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. all meteorology, and all tlie congeries of the mineral, .vegetable and animal worlds all the physical growth and development of man, and all the history of the race in politics, religions, wars, &c., there is a moral purpose, a visible or invisible intention, certainly underlying all its results and proof needing to be patiently waited for needing intuition, faith, idiosyncrasy, to its realization, which many, and especially the intellectual, do not have so in the product, or congeries of the product, of the greatest Literatus. This is the last, profoundest meas ure and test of a first-class literary or esthetic achieve ment, and when understood and put in force must fain, I say, lead to works, books, nobler than any hitherto known. Lo! Nature, (the only complete, actual poem,) existing calmly in the divine scheme, containing all, content, careless of the criticisms of a day, or these endless and wordy chatterers. And lo! to the con sciousness of the soul, the permanent Identity, the thought, the something, before which the magnitude even of Democracy, Art, Literature, &c., dwindles, be comes partial, measurable something that fully satis fies, (which those do not.) That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea of Eternity, and of itself, the Soul, buoyant, indestructi ble, sailing space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And' again lo! the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things where- from I feel and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter. I say in the future of These States must therefore arise Poets immenser far, and make great poems of Death. The poems of Life are great, but there must be the poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond itself. I have eulogized Homer, the sacred bards of Jewry, Eschylus, Juvenal, Shakespeare, &c., and acknowledged their inestimable value. But, (with perhaps the exception, in some, not all respects, of the second mentioned,) I say there must, for future and DEMOCEATTC VISTAS. 69 Democratic purposes, appear poets, (dare I to say so?) of higher class even than any of those poets not only possessed of the religious fire and abandon of Isaiah, luxuriant in the epic talent of Homer, or for characters as Shakespeare, but consistent with the Hegelian for mulas, and consistent "with modern science. America needs, and the world needs, a class of bards who will, now and ever, so link and tally the rational physical being of inan, with the ensembles of Time and Space, and with this vast and multiform show, Nature, sur rounding him, ever tantalizing him, equally a part, and yet not a part of him, as to essentially harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest. Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought back, by the same power that caused her departure restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this uni versal ennui, this coward fear, this shudcleiing at death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has the past, and does the present. What the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some great coming Literatus, especially Poet, who, while re maining fully poet, will absorb whatever science indi cates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose the great Poem of Death. Then will man indeed confront Nature, and confront Time and Space, both with science and con amore, and take his right place, prepared for life, master of fortune and misfortune. And then that which was long wanted will be supplied, and the ship that had it not before in all her voyages, will have an anchor. There are still other standards, suggestions, for pro ducts of high literatuses. That which really balances and conserves the social and political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and dread of punish ment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in human ity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, &c. Indeed, the perennial regulation, control and oversight, by self-sup- pliance, is sine qua non to Democracy ; and a highest, 70 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. widest aim of Democratic literature may well bo to bring forth, cultivate, brace and strengthen this sense in individuals and society. A strong mastership of the general inferior sell 1 by the superior self, -is to be aided, secured, indirectly but surely, by the literatus, in his works, shaping, for individual or aggregate Democracy, a great passionate Body, in and along with which goes a great masterful Spirit. And still, providing for contingencies, I fain confront the fact, the need of powerful native philosophs and orators and bards, These States, as rallying points to come, in times of danger, and to fend off ruin and de fection. For history is long, long, long. Shift and turn the combinations of the statement as we may, the prob lem of the future of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride, competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan ? Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful, threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it : Democracy grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all brings worse and worse invaders needs newer, larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers. Our lands, embracing so much, (embracing indeed the whole, rejecting none,) hold in their breast that flame also, capable of consuming themselves, consuming us all. Short as the span of our national life has been, already have death and downfall crowded close upon us and will again crowd close, no doubt, even if warded off. Ages to come may never know, but I know, how narrowly, during the late Secession war and more than once, and more than twice or thrice our Nationality, (wherein bound up, as in a ship in a storm, depended, and yet depend, all our best life, all hope, all value,) just grazed, just by a hair escaped de struction. Alas! to think of them! the agony and bloody sweat of certain of those hours! those cruel, sharp, suspended crises ! DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 71 Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, the blind fury of parties, infidelity, entire lack of first- class captains and leaders, added to the plentiful mean ness and vulgarity of the ostensible masses that prob lem, the Labor Question, beginning to open like a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year * what prospect have we ? "We sail a dangerous sea of seeth ing currents, cross and'under-currents, vortices all so dark, untried and whither shall we turn ? It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this Nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and many a deep intestine diffi culty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection, saying, Lo ! the roads, the only plans of development, * THE LABOR QUESTION. The immense problem of the rela tion, adjustment, conflict, between Labor and its status and pay, on the one side, and the Capital of employers on the other side looming up over These States like an ominous, limitless, murky cloud, perhaps before long to overshadow us. all ; the many thou sands of decent working-people, through the cities and elsewhere, trying to keep up a good appearance, but living by daily toil, from hand to mouth, with nothing ahead, and no owned homes the increasing aggregation of capital in the hands of a few the chaotic confusion of labor in the Southern States, consequent on the abrogation of slavery the Asiatic immigration on our Pacific side the advent of new machinery, dispensing more and more with hand-work the growing, alarming spectacle of countless squads of vagabond children, roaming everywhere the streets and wharves of the great cities, getting trained for thievery and pros titution the hideousness and squalor of certain quarters of the cities the advent of late years, and increasing frequency, of these pompous, nauseous, outside shows of vulgar w r ealth (What a chance for a new Juvenal !) wealth acquired perhaps by some quack, some measureless financial rogue, triply brazen in impu dence, only shielding himself by his money from a shaved head, a striped dress, and a felon's cell ; and then, below all, the plausi ble, sugar-coated, but abnormal and sooner or later inevitably ruinous delusion and loss, of our system of inflated paper-money currency, (cause of all conceivable swindles, false standards of value, and principal breeder and bottom of those enormous for tunes for the few, and of poverty for the million) with that other plausible and sugar-coated delusion, the theory and practice of a protective tariff, still clung to by many ; such, with plenty more, stretching themselves through many a long year, for solution, stand as huge impedimenta of America's progress. 72 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, over shadowing all else, past and present, putting the his tory of old-world dynasties, conquests, behind me, as of no account making a new history, the history of Democracy, making old history a dwarf I alone in augurating largeness, culminating Time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determina tions of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Behold, the anguish o! suspense, existence itself wavering in the balance, un certain whether to rise or fall ; already, close behind you or around you, thick winrows of corpses on battle fields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers, thieves everywhere cant, cre dulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought you great ness was to ripen for you, like a pear ? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell ot passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolu tions, prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, births, new pro jections and invigorations of ideas and men. Yet I have dreamed, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate, whose long unraveling stretches mysteriously through time dreamed out, portrayed, hinted already a little or a larger Band a band of brave and true, unprecedented yet armed and equipt at every point the members separated, it may be, by different dates and States, or south, or north, or east, or west Pacific or Atlantic a year, a century here, and other centuries there but always one, compact in Soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, inspired achievers, not only in Literature, the greatest art, but achievers in all art a new, undying order, dynasty, from age to age transmitted & band, a class, at least DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 73 as fit to cope with current years, our dangers, needs, as those who, for their times, so long, so well, in armor or in cowl, upheld, and made illustrious, the Feudal, priestly world. To offset Chivalry, indeed, those van ished countless knights, and the old altars, abbeys, all their priests, ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause to-day demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger, grander work, more than the counterpart and tally of them. Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for These Vistas, I confess that the promulgation and belief in such a class or institution a new and greater Literatus Order its possibility, (nay certainty,) underlies these entire speculations and that the rest, the other parts, as superstructures, are all founded upon it. It really seems to me the condition, not only of our future na tional development, hut of our perpetuation. In the highly artificial and materialistic bases of modern civili zation, with the corresponding arrangements and methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the depraving influences of riches just as much as pov erty, the absence of all high ideals in character with the long series of tendencies, shapings, which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations of humanity like uniform iron castings all of which, as compared with the Feudal ages, we can yet do nothing better than accept, make the best of, and even welcome, upon the whole, for their oceanic practical grandeur, and their restless wholesale knead ing of the masses I say of all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in the United States, with the results as already seen, accumulating, and reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force=infusion for purposes of Spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and primal Man liness and Womanliness or else our modern civiliza tion, with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are 4 74 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. on the road to a destiny, a status, equivalent, in this real world, to that of the fabled damned. To furnish, therefore, something like escape and foil and remedy to restrain, with gentle but sufficient hand, the terrors of materialistic, intellectual, and demo cratic civilization to ascend to more ethereal, yet just as real, atmospheres to invoke and set forth ineffable portraits of Personal Perfection, (the true, final aim of all,) I say rny eyes are fain to behold, though with straining sight and my spirit to prophecy far down the vistas of These States, that Order, Class, superber, far more efficient than any hitherto, arising. I say we must enlarge and entirely recast the theory of noble authorship, and conceive and put up as our model, a Literatus groups, series of Literatnses not only con sistent with modern science, practical, political, full of the arts, of highest erudition not only possessed by, and possessors of, Democracy even but with the equal of the burning fire and extasy of Conscience, which have brought down to us, over and through the centuries, that chain of old unparalleled Judean prophets, with their flashes of power, wisdom, and poetic beauty, law less as lightning, indefinite yet power, wisdom, beauty, above all mere art, and surely, in some respects, above all else we know 'of mere literature. Prospecting thus the coming unsped days, and that new Order in them marking the endless train of exer cise, development, unwind, in Nation as in man, which life is for we now proceed to note, aa on the hopeful terraces or platforms of our history, to be enacted, not only amid peaceful growth, but amid all perturbations, and after not a few departures, filling the vistas then, certain most coveted, stately arrivals. A few years, and there will be an appropriate na tive grand Opera, the lusty and wide-lipp'd offspring of Italian methods. Yet it will be no mere imitation, nor follow precedents, any more than Nature follows prece dents. Vast oval halls will be constructed, on acoustic principles, in cities, where companies of musicians will perform lyrical pieces, born to the people of These DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 75 States ; and the people will make perfect music a part of their live?. Every phase, every trade will have its songs, beautifying those trades. Men on the land will have theirs, and men on the water theirs. "Who now is ready to begin that work for America, of composing music fit for us songs, choruses, symphonies, operas, oratorios, fully identified with the body and soul of The States t music complete in all its appointments, but in some fresh, courageous, melodious, undeniable styles as all that is ever to permanently satisfy us must be. The composers to make such music are to learn every thing that can be possibly learned in the schools and traditions of their art, and then calmly dismiss all tradi tions from them. Also, a great breed of orators will one day spread over The United States, and be continued. Blessed are the people where, (the nation's Unity and Identity pre served at all hazards,) strong emergencies, throes, occur. Strong emergencies will continually occur in America, and will be provided for. Such orators are wanted as have never yet been heard upon the earth. What speci men have we had where even the physical capacities of the voice have been fully accomplished ? I think there would be in the human voice, thoroughly practised and brought out, more seductive pathos than in 'any organ or any orchestra of stringed instruments, and a ring more impressive than that of artillery. Also, in a few years, there will be, in the cities of These States, immense Museums, with suites of halls, containing samples and illustrations from all the places and peoples of the earth, old and new. In these halls, in the presence of these illustrations, the noblest s.avans will deliver lectures to thousands of young men and women, on history, natural history, the sciences, &c. History itself will get released from being that false and distant thing, that fetish it has been. It will be come a friend, a venerable teacher, a live being, with hands, voice, presence. It will be disgraceful to a young- person not to know chronology, geography, poems, heroes, deeds, and all the former nations, and 76 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. present ones also and it will be disgraceful in a teacher to teach any less or more than he believes. We see, fore-indicated, amid these prospects and hopes, new law-forces of spoken and written language not merely the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar with precedents, made for matters of outside propriety, fine words, thoughts definitely told out but a language fanned by the breath of Nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigorates to grow tallies life and character, and seldomer tells a thing than suggests or necessitates it. In fact, a new theory of literary compo sition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to These States. Books are to be called for, and supplied, on the as sumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle ; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well- trained, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers. Investigating here, we see, not that it is a little thing we have, in having the bequeathed libraries, countless shelves of volumes, records, &c. ; yet how serious the danger, depending entirely on them, of tho bloodless vein, the nerveless arm, the false application, at second or third hand. After all, we see Life, not bred, (at least in its more modern and essential parts,) in those great old Libraries, nor America nor Democ racy favored nor applauded there. We see that tho real interest of this People of burs in the Theology, History, Poetry, Politics, and Personal Models of the past, (the British islands, for instance, and indeed all the past,) is not necessarily to mould ourselves or our literature upon them, but to attain fuller, more definite DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 77 comparisons, warnings, and the insight to ourselves, our own present, and our own far grander, different, future history, Religion, social customs, &c. We see that almost everything that has been written, sung, or stated, of old, with reference to hu manity under the Feudal and Oriental institutes, reli gions, and for other lands, needs to be re-written, re- sung, re-stated, in terms consistent with the institution of These States, and to come in range and obedient uniformity with them. We see, as in the universes of the material Kosmos, after meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born through them, to prove them, con centrate them, to turn upon them with wonder and love to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior realms so out of the series of the preceding social and political universes, now arise These States their main purport being not in the new ness and importance of their politics or inventions, but in new, grander, more advanced Religions, Literatures, and Art. We see that while many were supposing things estab lished and completed, really the grandest things always remain ; and discover that the worli of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun. We see our land, America, her Literature, Esthetics, &c., as, substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of History and Man and the portrayal, (under the eternal laws and conditions of beauty,) of our own physiognomy, the subjective tie and expression of the objective, as from, our own combination, continu ation and points of view and the deposit and record of the national mentality, character, appeals, heroism, wars, and even liberties where these, and all, culmi nate in native formulation, to be perpetuated ; and not having which native, first-class formulation, she will flounder about, and her other, however imposing, eminent greatness, prove merely a passing gleam ; but truly having which, she will understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and, swinging, poised 78 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. safely on herself, illumined and illuming, become a full- formed world, and divine Mother not only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through Time. Finally, we have to admit, we see, even to-day, and in all these things, the born Democratic taste and will of The United States, regardless of precedent, or of any authority but their own, beginning to arrive, seeking place which, in due time, they will fully occupy. At tirst, of course, under current prevalences of theology, conventions, criticism, &c., all appears impracticable takes chances to be denied and misunderstood. There with, of course, murmurers, puzzled persons, supercil ious inquirers, (with a mighty stir and noise among these windy little gentlemen that swarm in literature, in the magazines.) But America, advancing steadily, evil as well as good, penetrating deep, without one thought of retraction, ascending, expanding, keeps her course, hundreds, thousands of years. GENEKAL NOTES. " SOCIETY." I have myself little or no hope from what is technically called " Society " in our American cities. New York, of which place I have spoken so sharply, still promises something, in time, out of its tremendous and varied materials, with a certain superiority of intuitions, and the advantage of constant agitation, and ever new and rapid dealings of the cards. Of Boston, with its circles of social mummies, swathed in cerements harder than brass its bloodless religion, (Unitarianism,) its complacent vanity of scientism and literature, lots of grammatical correctness, mere knowledge, (always wearisome, in itself ) its zealous abstractions, ghosts of reforms I should say, (ever admitting its business powers, its sharp, almost demoniac, intellect, and no lack, in its own way, of courage and generosity) there is, at present, little of cheering, satisfying sign. In the West, California, &c., " society " is yet unformed, puerile, seemingly unconscious of anything above a driving business, or to liberally spend the money made by it in the usual rounds and shows. Then there is, to the humorous observer of American attempts at fashion, according to the models of foreign courts and saloons, quite a comic side particularly visible at Washington City, a sort of high life below stairs business. As if any farce could be funnier, for instance, than the scenes of the crowds, winter nights, meandering around our Presidents and their wives, Cabinet officers, western or other Senators, Representatives, &c.; born of good laboring, mechanic, or farmer stock and antecedents, attempt ing those full-dress receptions, finesse of parlors, foreign ceremo nies, etiquettes, &c. Indeed, considered with any sense of propriety, or any sense at all, the whole of this illy-played fashionable play and display, with their absorption of the best part of our wealthier citizens' time, money, energies, &c., is ridiculously out of place in the United States. As if our proper man and woman, (far, far greater words than " gentleman " and " lady,") could still fail to see, and presently achieve, not this spectral business, but something truly noble, active, sane, American by modes, perfections of character, manners, costumes, social relations, &c., adjusted to standards, far, far different from those ! 80 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. Eminent and liberal foreigners, British or continental, must at times have their faith fearfully tried by what they see of our New World personalities. The shallowest and least American persons seem surest to push abroad and call without fail on well- known foreigners, who are doubtless affected with indescribable qualms by these queer ones. Then, more than half of our authors and writers evidently think it a great thing to be " aristocratic," and sneer at progress, democracy, revolution, &c. If some inter national literary Snobs' Gallery were established, it is certain that America could contribute at least her full share of the portraits, and some very distinguished ones. Observe that the most impu dent slanders, low insults, &c., on the great revolutionary authors, leaders, poets, &c., of Europe, have their origin and main circiila- tion in certain circles here. The treatment of Victor Hugo living, and Byron dead, are samples. Both deserving so well of America ; and both persistently attempted to be soiled here by unclean birds, male and female. Meanwhile, I must still offset the like of the foregoing, and all it infers, by the recognition of the fact, that while the surfaces of current society here show so much that is dismal, noisome and vapory, there are, beyond question, inexhaustible supplies, as of true gold ore, in the mines of America's general humanity. Let us, not ignoring the dross, give fit stress to these precious, im mortal values also. Let it be distinctly admitted, that whatever may be said of our fashionable society, and of any foul fractions and episodes only here in America, out of the long history, and manifold presentations of the ages, has at last arisen, and now stands, what never before took positive form and sway, THE PEOPLE and that, viewed en-masse, and while fully acknowl edging deficiencies, dangers, faults, this People, inchoate, latent, not yet come to majority, nor to its own religious, literary or esthetic expression, yet affords, to-day, an exultant justification of all the faith, all the hopes and prayers and prophecies of good men through the past the stablest, solidest-based government of the world the most assured in a future the beaming Pharos to whose perennial light all earnest eyes, the world over, are tending And that already, in and from it, the Democratic prin ciple, having been mortally tried by severest tests, fatalities, of war and peace, now issues from the trial, unharmed, trebly-in vigorated, perhaps to commence forthwith its finally triumphant march around the globe. BRITISH LITERATURE. To avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend the study of this literature, but wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. American students may well derive from all former lands from forenoon Greece and Borne, down to the perturbed medieval times, the Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect all the older lit eratures, and all the newer ones from witty and warlike France, and markedly, and in many ways, and at many different periods, GENERAL NOTES. 81 from the enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race bearing ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its na tions living the offspring, this America of ours, the Daughter, not by any means of the British isles exclusively, but of the Con tinent, and all continents. Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully fructify those germs we also hold from Italy, France, Spain, especially in the best imaginative productions of those lands, which are, in many ways, loftier and subtler than the Eng lish, or British, and indispensable to complete our service, propor tions, education, reminiscences, &c The British element These States hold, and have always held, enormously beyond its fit pro portions. I have already spoken of Shakespeare. He seems to me of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are im mense, forever dear to humanity and his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much in him that is offen sive to Democracy. He is not only the tally of Feudalism, but I should say Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising Feudal ism, in literature. Then one seems to detect something in him I hardly know how to describe it even amid the dazzle of his genius; and, in inferior manifestations, it is found in nearly all leading British authors. (Perhaps we will have to import the words Snob, Snobbish, &c., after all.) While of the great poems of Asian antiquity, the Indian epics, the Book of Job, the Ionian Iliad, the unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and death of Christ, in the New Testament, (indeed Homer and the Biblical utterances intertwine familiarly with us, in the main,) and along down, of most of the characteristic imaginative or ro mantic relics of the continent, as the Cid, Cervantes' Don Quixote, &c., I should say they substantially adjust themselves to us, and, far off as they are, accord curiously with our bed and board, to day, in 1870, in Brooklyn, Washington, Canada, Ohio, Texas, California and with our notions, both of seriousness and of fun, and our standards of heroism, manliness, and even the Democratic requirements those requirements are not only not fulfilled in the Shakesperean productions, but are insulted on every page. I add that while England is among the greatest of lands in political freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart personal char acter, &c. the spirit of English literature is not great, at least is not greatest and its products are no models for us. With the exception of Shakespeare, there is no first-class genius, or ap proaching to first-class, in that literature which, with a truly vast amount of value, and of artificial beauty, (largely from the classics,) is almost always material, sensual, not spiritual almost always congests, makes plethoric, not frees, expands, dilates is cold, anti-Democratic, loves to be sluggish and stately, and shows much of that characteristic of vulgar persons, the dread of saying or doing something not at all improper in itself, but unconven tional, and that may be laughed at. In its best, the sombre per- 82 DEMOCBATIC VISTAS. vadcs it ; it is moody, melancholy, and, to give it its due, ex presses, in characters and plots, those qualities, in an unrivaled manner. Yet not as the black thunderstorms, and in great nor mal, crashing passions, as of the Greek dramatists clearing the air, refreshing afterward, bracing with power ; but as in Hamlet, moping, sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a secret taste for the blues, the morbid fascination, the luxury of wo (I cannot dismiss English, or British imaginative literature without the cheerful name of Walter Scott. In my opinion he deserves to stand next to Shakespeare. Both are, in their best and absolute quality, continental, not British both teeming, luxuriant, true to their lands and origin, namely feudality, yet ascending into uni- versalism. Then, I should say, both deserve to be finally consid ered and construed as shining suns, whom it were ungracious to pick spots upon.) I strongly recommend all the young men and young women of the United States to whom it may be eligible, to overhaul the well-freighted fleets, the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, Ger many, so full of those elements of freedom, self possession, gay- heartedness, subtlety, dilation, needed in preparations for the future of The States. I only wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at the feeling for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it will go on. THE LATE WAR. The Secession War in the United States appears to me as the last great material and military outcropping of the Feudal spirit, in our New World history, society, &c. Though it was not certain, hardly probable, that the effort for founding a Slave-Holding power, by breaking up the Union, should be successful, it was urged on by indomitable passion, pride and will. The signal downfall of this effort, the abolition of Slavery, and the extirpation of the Shareholding Class, (cut out and thrown away like a tumor by surgical operation,) makes incomparably the longest advance for Radical Democracy, utterly removing its only really dangerous impediment, and insuring its progress in the United States and thence, of course, over the world (Our immediate years witness the solution of three vast, life-threaten ing calculi, in different parts of the world the removal of serfdom in Russia, slavery in the United States, and of the meanest of Imperialisms in France.) Of the Secession War itself, we know, in the ostent, what has been done. The numbers of the dead and wounded can bo told, or approximated, the debt posted and put on record, the material events narrated, &c. Meantime, the war being over, elections go on, laws are passed, political parties struggle, issue their plat forms, &c., just the same as before. But immensest results of the War not only in Politics, but in Literature, Poems, and Sociol ogy are doubtless waiting yet unformed, in the future. How long they will wait I cannot tell. The pageant of History's retrospect shows us, ages since, all Europe marching on the Cm- GENERAL NOTES. 83 sadcs, those wondrous armed uprisings of tlic People, stirred by a mere idea, to grandest attempt and, when once baffled in it, returning, at intervals, twice, thrice, and again. An unsurpassed series of revolutionary events, influences. Yet it took over two hundred years for the seeds of the Crusades to germinate before beginning even to sprout. Two hundred years they lay, sleeping, not dead, but dormant in the ground. Then, out of them, un erringly, arts, travel, navigation, politics, literature, freedom, in ventions, the spirit of adventure, inquiry, all arose, grew, and steadily sped on to what we see at present. Far back there, that huge agitation-struggle of the Crusades, stands, as undoubtedly the embryo, the start, of the high preeminence of experiment, civilization and enterprise which the European nations have since sustained, and of which These States are the heirs. GENERAL SUFFRAGE, ELECTIONS, &c. It still remains doubtful to me whether these will ever secure, officially, the best wit and capacity whether, through them, the first-class genius of America will ever personally appear in the high political stations, the Presi dency, Congress, the leading State offices, &c. Those offices, or the candidacy for them, arranged, won, by caucusing, money, the favoritism or pecuniary interest of rings, the superior manipula tion of the ins over the outs, or the outs over the ins, are, indeed, at best, the mere business agencies of the people, are useful as formulating, neither the best and highest, but the average of the public judgment, sense, justice, (or sometimes want of judgment, sense, justice.) We elect Presidents, Congressmen, &c., not so much to have them consider and decide for us, but as surest prac tical means of expressing the will of majorities on mooted ques tions, measures, &c. As to general suffrage, after all, since we have gone so far, the more general it is, the better. I favor the widest opening of the doors. Let the ventilation and area be wide enough, and all is safe. We can never have a born penitentiary-bird, or panel-thief, or lowest gambling-hell or groggery keeper, for President though such may not only emulate, but get, high offices from localities even from the proud and wealthy city of New York. STATE RIGIITS. Freedom, (under the universal laws,) and the fair and uncramped play of Individuality, can only be had at all through strong-knit cohesion, identity. There are, who, talking of the rights of The States, as in separatism and independence, condemn a rigid nationality, centrality. But to my mind, the freedom, as the existence at all, of The States, pre-necessitates such a Nationality, an imperial Union. Thus, it is to serve sepa ratism that we favor generalization, consolidation. It is to give, under the compaction of potent general law, an independent vitality and sway within their spheres, to The States singly, (really just as important a part of our scheme as the sacred Union itself,) that we insist on the preservation of cur Nation- 84 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. ality forever, and at all hazards. I say neither States, nor any- thing like State Rights, could permanently exist on any other terms. LATEST FROM EUROPE. As I send my last pages to press, (Sept. 19, 1870,) the ocean-cable, continuing- its daily budget of Franco-German war-news Louis Napoleon a prisoner, (his rat- cunning at an end) the conquerors advanced on Paris the French, assuming Republican forms seeking to negotiate with the King of Prussia, at the head of his armies " his Majesty," says the despatch, "refuses to treat, on any terms, with a govern ment risen out of Democracy." Let us note the words, and not forget them. The official rela tions of Our States, we know, are with the reigning kings, queens, &c., of the Old World. But the only deep, vast, emotional, real affinity of America is with the cause of Popular Government there and especially in France. that I could express, in my printed lines, the passionate yearnings, the pulses of sympathy, forever throbbing in the heart of These States, for sake of that the eager eyes forever turned to that watching it, struggling, appearing and disappearing, often apparently gone under, yet never to be abandoned, in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and in the British Islands. Song of the Exposition. Song of the Redwood-Tree, Song of the Universal. Song for All Seas. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by WALT WHITMAN, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington . KM* llEi't'iu.rc Federal St., Camdeu. (The MUSE invited to PHILADELPHIA. Applied to THE CENTENNIAL, Phila., 1876 (Originally recited for Opening tht, Wth Annual Exhibition AMERICAN INSTITUTE, New York, noon, September 1th, 1871.) STRUGGLING steadily to the front, not only in the spirit of Opinion, Gov ernment, and the like, but, in due time, in the Artistic also, we see actual operative LABOR and LABORERS, with Machinery, Inventions, Farms, Pro ducts, &c., pressing to place our time, over the whole civilized world. Hold ing these by the hand, we see, or hope we see, THE MUSE, (radiating, repre senting, under its various expressions, as in every age and land, the healthiest, most heroic Humanity, common to all, fusing all,) entering the demesnes of the ISew World, as twin and sister of our Democracy at any rate we will so invite Her. here and now to permanently infuse in daily toils, and be infused by them. Perhaps no clearer or more illustrative sign exists of the current adjustment, and tendency than those superb International Expositions of the World'* Products, Inventions and Industries, that, commencing in London under Prince Albert, have since signalized all the principal Nations of our age, and have been rife in the United States culminating in this great Exposition at Philadelphia, around which the American Centennial, and its thoughts and associations, cluster with vaster ones still in the future. Ostensibly to inaugurate an Exposition of this kind still more to outline the establishment of a grand permanent Cluster-Palace of Industry from an imaginative and Democratic point of view was the design of the following poem ; from such impulses it was ftrst orally deliver'd. 1 AFTER all, not to create only, or found only, But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded, To give it our own indentity, average, limitless, free ; (To fill the gross, the torpid bulk, with vital religious fire :) Not to repel or destroy, so much as accept, fuse, rehabili tate ; To obey, as well as command to follow, more than to lead ; These also are the lessons of our New World ; While how little the New, after all how much the Old. Old World J Long, long, long, has the grass been growing, Long and long has the rain been falling, Long has the globe been rolling round. CENTENNIAL SONGS. Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia ; Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy, and Achilles' wrath, and Eneas'. Odysseus' wanderings ; Placard ' Removed ' and ' To Let ' on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus ; Repeat at Jerusalem place the notice high on Jaffa's gate, and on Mount Moriah ; The same on the walls of the great Italian Cathedrals, and German, French and Spanish Castles ; For know a better, fresher, busier sphere a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you. Responsive to our summons, Or rather to her long-nurs'd inclination, Join'd with an irresistible, natural gravitation, She comes ! this famous Female (as was indeed to be ex pected ; For who, so ever-youthful, 'cute and handsome, would wish to stay in mansions such as those, When offer'd quarters with all the modern improvements. With all the fun that's going and all the best society ?) She comes I I hear the rustling of her gown ; I scent the odor of her breath's delicious fragrance ; I mark her step divine her curious eyes a-turning, rolling. Upon this very scene. The Dame of Dames ! can I believe then, Those ancient temples classic, and castles strong and feudal- istic, could none of them restrain her ? Nor shades of Virgil and Dante nor myriad memories. poems, old associations, magnetize and hold on to Her? But that she's left them all and here? Yes, if you will allow me to say so, I, my friends, if you do not, can plainly see Her, The same Undying Soul of Earth's, activity's, beauty's, heroism's Expression, Out from her evolutions hither come submerged the strata of her former themes, Hidden and cover'd by to-day's foundation of to-day's ; Ended, deceas'd, through time, her voice by Castaly's foun tain, Silent through time the broken-lipp'd Sphynx in Egypt- silent those century-baffling tombs ; SONG OF THE EXPOSITION. 5 Ended for aye the epics of Asia's, Europe's helmeted war riors ended the primitive call of the Muses ; Calliope's call forever closed Clio, Melpomene, Thalia dead ; Ended the stately rhythmus of Una and Oriana ended the quest of the Holy Graal ; Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind extinct ; The Crusaders' streams of shadowy, midnight troops, sped with the sunrise ; Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone Charlemagne, Roland, Oli ver gone, Palmerin, ogre, departed vanish'd the turrets that Usk re flected, Arthur vanish'd with all his knights Merlin and Larcelot and Galahad all gone dissolv'd utterly, like an exhalation ; Pass'd ! pass'd ! for us, forever pass'd ! that once so mighty World now void, inanimate, phantom World f Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign World ! with all its gorgeous legends, myths, Its kings and barons proud its priests, and warlike lords, and courtly dames ; Pass'd to its charnel vault laid on the shelf coffin'd, with Crown and Armor on, Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page, And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme. I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the Animus of all that World, Escaped, bequeath'd, (and yet, fugacious as ever,) leaving those dead remains, and now this spot approaching, filling ; And I can hear what may-be you do not a terrible esthe- tical commotion, (With howling desperate gulp of ' flower ' and ' bower,' With ' Sonnet to Matilda's Eyebrow ' quite, quite frantic ; With gushing, sentimental reading circles turn'd to ice or stone ; With many a squeak, in metre choice, from Boston, New York, Paris, London ;) As she, the illustrious Emigre, (having, it is true, in her day, although the same, changed, journey 'd considerable,) Making directly for this Rendezvous vigorously clearing a path for herself striding through the confusion, By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay'd, BlufPd not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertili zers, Smiling and pleas'd, with palpable intent to stay, She's here, install'd amid the kitchen ware ! CENTENNIAL SONGS. But hold don't I forget my manners ? To introduce the Stranger (what else indeed have I come for?) to thee, Columbia ; In Liberty's name, welcome, Immortal ! clasp hands, And ever henceforth Sisters dear be both. Fear not, O Muse ! truly new ways and days receive, sur round you, I candidly confess a queer, queer race, of novel fashion, And yet the same old Human Race the same within, without, Faces and hearts the same feelings the same yearnings the same, The same old love beauty and use the same. We do not blame thee, Elder World nor separate ourselves from thee : (Would the Son separate himself from the Father?) Looking back on 'jhee seeing thee to thy duties, grandeurs, through past ages bending, building, We build to ours to-day. Mightier than Egypt's tombs, Fairer than Grecia's, Roma's temples, Prouder than Milan's statued, spired Cathedral, More picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps, We plan, even now, to raise, beyond them all, Thy great Cathedral, sacred Industry no tomb, A Keep for life for practical Invention. As in a waking vision, E'en while I chant, I see it rise I scan and prophecy, out side and in, Its manifold ensemble. Around a Palace, Loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet, (Earth's modern Wonder, History's Seven outstripping, High rising tier on tier, with glass and iron facades, Gladdening the sun and sky enhued in cheermlest hues, Bronze, lilac, robin's-egg, marine and crimson, Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner, Freedom, The banners of The States, and flags of every Land,) A brood of lofty, fair, but lesser Palaces shall cluster. SONG OF THE EXPOSITION. 7 Somewhere within the walls of all, Shall all that forwards perfect human life be started, Tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited. Here shall you trace in flowing operation, In every state of practical, busy movement, The rills of Civilization. Materials here, under your eye, shall change their shape, as if by magic ; The cotton shall be pick'd almost in the very field, Shall be dried, clean'd, ginn'd, baled, spun into thread and cloth, before you : You shall see hands at work at all the old processes, and all the new ones ; You shall see the various grains, and how flour is made, and then bread baked by the bakers ; You shall see the crude ores of California and Nevada pass ing on and on till they become bullion ; You shall watch how the printer sets type, and learn what a composing-stick is ; You shall mark, in amazement, the Hoe press whirling its cylinders, shedding the printed leaves steady and fast; The photograph, model, watch, pin, nail, shall be created before you. In large calm halls, a stately Museum shall teach you the infinite, solemn lessons of Minerals ; In another, Woods, Plants, Vegetation shall be illustrated in another Animals, animal life and development. One stately house shall be the Music House ; Others for other Arts Learning, the Sciences, shall all be here, None shall be slighted none but shall here be honor 'd, help'd, exampled. This, this and these, America, shall be your Pyramids and Obelisks, Your Alexandrian Pharos, gardens of Babylon, Your temple at Olympia. The male and female many laboring not, Shall ever here confront the laboring many, With precious benefits to both glory to all, To thee, America and thee, Eternal Muse. 8 CENTENNIAL SONGS. And here shall ye inhabit, Powerful Matrons ! In your vast state, vaster than all the old ; Echoed through long, long centuries to come, To sound of different, prouder songs, with stronger themes, Practical, peaceful life the people's life the People them selves, Lifted, illumin'd, bathed in Peace elate, secure in peace. Away with themes of war ! away with War itself ! Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show of blacken'd, mutilated corpses ! That hell unpent, and raid of blood fit for wild tigers, or for lop-tongued wolves not reasoning men ! And in its stead speed Industry's campaigns ! With thy undaunted armies. Engineering ! Thy pennants, Labor, loosen'd to the breeze ! Thy bugles sounding loud and clear ! Away with old romance ! Away with novels, plots, and plays of foreign courts ! Away with love-verses, sugar'd in rhyme the intrigues, amours of idlers, Fitted for only banquets of the night, where dancers to late music slide ; The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few, With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chan deliers. To you, ye Reverent, sane Sisters, I raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for Art, To exalt the present and the real, To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade, To sing, in songs, how exercise and chemical life are never to be baffled ; Boldly to thee, America, to-day ! and thee, Immortal Muse ! To practical, manual work, for each and all to plough, hoe, dig, To plant and tend the tree, the berry, vegetables, flowers, For every man to see to it that he really do something for every woman too ; To use the hammer and the saw, (rip, or cross-cut,) To cultivate a turn for carpentering, plastering, painting, To work as tailor, tailoress, nurse, hostler, porter, To invent a little something ingenious to aid the wash ing, cooking, cleaning, And hold it no disgrace to take a hand at them themselves. SONG OF THE EXPOSITION. 9 I say I bring thee, Muse, to-day and here, All occupations, duties broad and close, Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation, The old, old general burdens, interests, joys, The family, parentage, childhood, husband and wife, The house-comforts the house itself, and all its belongings, Food and its preservation chemistry applied to it ; Whatever forms the average, strong, complete, sweet- blooded Man or Woman the perfect longeve Per sonality, And helps its present life to health and happiness and shapes its Soul, For the eternal Real Life to come. With latest materials, works, the INTER-TRANSPORTATION of the World, Steam-power, the great Express lines, gas, petroleum, These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic's delicate Cable, The Pacific Railroad, the Suez Canal, the Mont Cenis and Hoosac Tunnels, the Brooklyn Bridge ; This earth all spann'd with iron Rails with lines of Steam ships threading every sea, Our own Rondure, the current globe I bring. 10 And thou, America! Thy swarm of offspring towering high yet higher Thee above all towering, With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law; Thou Union, holding all fusing, absorbing, tolerating all, Thee, ever thee, I bring. Thou also thou. a World ! With all thy wide geographies, manifold, different, distant, Rounded by thee in one One common orbic language, One common indivisible destinv, for All. 11 And by the spells which ye vouchsafe, To those, your ministers in earnest, I here personify and call my themes, To make them pass before ye. Behold, America! (And thou, ineffable Guest and Sister !) For thee come trooping up thy waters and thy lands : Behold ! thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and moun tains, As in procession coming, o 10 CENTENNIAL SONGS. Behold ! the sea itself ! And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships : See ! where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the green and blue ! See ! the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port ! See ! dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke. Behold, in Oregon, far in the north and west, Or in Maine, far in the north and east, thy cheerful axemen, Wielding all day their axes ! Behold, on the lakes, thy pilots at their wheels thy oars men! Behold, how the ash writhes under those muscular arms ! There by the furnace, and there by the anvil, Behold thy sturdy blacksmiths, swinging their sledges, Overhand so steady overhand they turn and fall with joy ous clank, Like a tumult of laughter. Behold ! (for still the procession moyes,) Beheld, Mother of All, thy countless sailors, boatmen. coasters ! The myriads of thy young and old mechanics. Mark mark the spirit of invention everywhere thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising ; See, from their chimneys, how the tall flame-fires stream ! Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South, Thy wealthy Daughter-States, Eastern and Western, The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas, and the rest ; Thy limitless crops grass, wheat, sugar, corn, rice, hemp, hops, Thy barns all fill'd thy endless freight-trains, and thy bulg ing store-houses, The grapes that ripen on thy vines the apples in thy orchards, Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes thy coal thy gold and silver, The inexhaustible iron in thy mines. 12 All thine, sacred Union ! Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines, City and State North, South, item and aggregate, We dedicate, dread Mother, all to thee ! SONG OF THE EXPOSITION. 11 Protectress absolute, thou ! Bulwark of all ! For well we know that while thou givest each and all, (gen erous as Ged,) Without thee neither all nor each, nor land, home, Ship, nor mine nor any here, this day, secure, Nor aught, nor any day, secure. 13 And thou, thy Emblem, waving over all ! Delicate Beauty ! a word to thee, (it may be salutary ;) Remember, thou hast not always been, as here to-day, so comfortably ensovereign'd : In other scenes than these have I observ'd thee, flagj, Not quite so trim and whole, and freshly blooming, in folds of stainless silk ; But I have seen thee, bunting, to tatters torn, upon thy splinter'd staff, Or clutch'd to some young color-bearer's breast, with des perate hands, Savagely struggled for, for life or death fought over long, 'Mid cannon's thunder-crash, and many a curse, and groan and yell and rifle-volleys cracking sharp, And moving masses, as wild demons surging and lives as nothing risk'd, For thy mere remnant, grimed with dirt and smoke, and sopp'd in blood ; For sake of that, my beauty and that thou might'st dally, as now, secure up there, Many a good man have I seen go under. 14 Now here, and these, and hence, in peace, all thine, O Flag ! And here, and hence, for thee, O Universal Muse ! and thou for them ! And here and hence, O Union, all the work and workmen thine I None separate from Thee henceforth one only, We and (For the blood of the Children what is it, only the blood Maternal ? And lives and works what are they all at last, except the roads to Faith and Death ?) While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for Thee, dear Mother ! We own it all and several to-day indissoluble in Thee ; Think not our chant, our show, merely for products gross, or lucre it is for Thee, the Soul in thee, electric, spiritual ! Our farms, inventions, crops, we own in Thee 1 Cities and States in Thee ! Our freedom all in Thee ! our very lives in Thee ! 12 CENTENNIAL SONGS. SONG OF THE REDWOOD-TREE. A CALIFORNIA song ! A prophecy and indirection a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air ; A chorus of dryads, fading, departing or hamadryads de parting ; A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky. Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense. Farewell, my brethren. Farewell, O earth and sky farewell, ye neighboring waters : My time has ended, my term has come. Along the northern coast, Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves, In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country, With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse. With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms, Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes there in the Redwood forest dense, I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting. The choppers heard not the camp shanties echoed not ; The quick-ear'd teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not, As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain ; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time chant, not of the past onlv. but the future. You untold life of me, And all you venerable and innocent joys, Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, ''mid rain, and many a summer sun, And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds ; the great patient, rugged joys ! my souVs strong joys, unreck\l by man; SONG OF THE REDWOOD-TREE. 13 (For know I bear the soul befitting me / too have consciousness. identity , And all the rocks and mountains have and all the earth;) Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Our time, our term has come. Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers. We who have grandly filVd our time ; With Nature's calm content, and tacit, huge delight, We welcome what we wrought J or through the past, And leave the field for them. For them predicted long, For a superber Race they too to grandly fill their time, For them we abdicate in them ourselves, ye forest Icings I In them these skies and airs these mountain peaks Shasta Neva das, These huge, precipitous cliffs this amplitude these valleys- grand Yosemite, To be in them absorb' d, assimilated. Then to a loftier strain, Still prouder, more ecstatic, rose the chant, As if the heirs, the Deities of the West, Joining, with master-tongue, bore part. Not wan from Asia's fetishes, Nor red from Europe's old dynastic slaughter-house, ( Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds every where,} But come from Nature's long and harmless throes peacefully builded thence, These virgin lands Lands of the Western Shore, To the new Culminating Man to you, the Empire New, You,promis'd long, we pledge, we dedicate. You occult, deep volitions. You average Spiritual Manhood, purpose of ail, pois'd on your self giving, not taking law, You Womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love, and aught that comes from life and love, You unseen Moral Essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age, working in Death the same as Life,} You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden National Will, lying in your abysms, conceal'd, but ever alert, You past and present purposes , tenaciously pursued, may-be un conscious of yourselves. 14 CENTENNIAL SONGS. Unswerv'd by all the passing errors, perturbations of the sur face ; You vital-, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures, Here build your homes for good establish here These areas entire, Lands of the Western Shore, We pledge, we dedicate to you. For man of you your characteristic Race, Here may he hardy, sweet , gigantic grow here tower, propor tionate to Nature, Here climb the vast, pure spaces, unconjined, unchecked by wall or roof, Here laugh with storm or sun here joy here patiently inure, Here heed himself, unfold himself (not others' formulas heed) here Jill his time, To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last, To disappear, to serve. Thus, on the northern coast, In the echo of teamsters' calls, and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers' axes, The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan , Such words combined from the Redwood-tree as of wood- spirits' voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling, The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing, All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving, From the Cascade range t the Wasatch or Idaho far, or Utah, To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding, The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity the settlements, features all, In the Mendocino woods I caught. The flashing and golden pageant of California ! The sudden and gorgeous drama the sunny and ample lands ; The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south ; Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air valleys and mountain cliffs ; The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow the silent, cyclic chemistry ; The slow and steady ages plodding the unoccupied surface ripening thelich ores forming beneath; At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where ; CENTENNIAL SONGS. 15 Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific ; Populous cities the latest inventions the steamers on the rivers the railroads with many a thrifty farm, with machinery, And wool, and wheat, and the grape and diggings of yel low gold. But more in you than these, Lands of the Western Shore ! (These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,) I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr'd, Promis'd, to be fulfilled, our common kind, the Race. The New Society at last, proportionate to Nature, . In Man of you, more than your mountain peaks, or stalwart trees imperial, In Woman more, far more, than all your gold, or vines, or even vital air. Fresh come, to a New World indeed, yet long prepared, I see the Genius of the Modern, child of the Eeal and Ideal, Clearing the ground for broad Humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, To build a grander future. SONG OF THE UNIVERSAL. [Commencement Poem, Tuft's College, Mass., June 17, 1874.] 1 COME, said the Muse, Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the Universal. In this broad Earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed Perfection. By every life a share, or more or less, None born bat it is born conceal'd or unconceaPd, the seed is waiting. 16 CENTENNIAL SONGS. Lo ! keen-eyed, towering Science ! As from tall peaks the Modern overlooking, Successive, absolute fiats issuing. Yet again, lo ! the Soul above all science; For it, has History gather'd like a husk around the globe ; For it, the entire star-myriads roll through the 8ky. In spiral roads, by long detours, (As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,) For it, the partial to the permanent flowing, For it, the Real to the Ideal tends. For it, the mystic evolution ; Not the right only justified what we call evil also justified. Forth from their masks, no matter what, From the huge, festering trunk from craft and guile and tears, Health to emerge, and joy joy universal. Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow, Out of the bad majority the varied, countless frauds of men and States. Electric, antiseptic'yet cleaving, suffusing all, Only the Good is universal. Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow, An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering, High in the purer, happier air. From imperfection's murkiest cloud, Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, One flash of Heaven's glory. To fashion's, custom's discord, To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies, Soothing each lull, a strain is heard, just heard, From some far shore, the final chorus sounding. O the blest eyes ! the happy hearts I That see that know the guiding thread so fine. Along the mighty labyrinth ! And thou, America ! SONG OF THE UNIVERSAL. 17 For the Scheme's culmination its Thought, and its Reality, For these, (not for thyself,) Thou hast arrived. Thou too surroundest all ; Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, Thou too, by pathways broad and new, To the Ideal tendest. The measur'd faiths of other lands the grandeurs of the past, Are not for Thee but grandeurs of Thine own ; Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all, All eligible to all. All, all for Immortality! Love, like the light, silently wrapping all I Nature's amelioration blessing all ! The blossoms, fruits of ages orchards divine and certain ; Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to Spiritual Images ripening. Give me, God, to sing that thought! Give me give him or her I love, this quenchless faith In Thy ensemble. "Whatever else withheld, withhold not from us, Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space ; Health, peace, salvation universal. Is it a dream ? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream. SONG FOR ALL SEAS, ALL SHIPS. TO-DAY a rude brief recitative, Of ships sailing the Seas, each with its special flag or ship- signal ; Of unnamed heroes in the ships Of waves spreading and spreading, far as the eye can reach ; Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing ; And out of these a chant, for the. sailors of all nations, Fitful, like a surge. 18 SONO FOR ALL SEAS. Of Sea-Captains young or old, and the Mates and of all intrepid Sailors ; Of the few, very choice, tactiturn, whom fate can never sur prise, nor death dismay, Pick'd sparingly, without noise, by thee, old Ocean chosen by thee, Thou Sea, that pickest and cullest the race, in Time, and unitest Nations! Suckled by thee, old husky Nurse embodying thee ! Indomitable, untamed as thee. (Ever the heroes, on water or on land, by ones or twos ap pearing, Ever the stock preserv'd, and never lost, though rare enough for seed preserv'd.) Flaunt out Sea, your separate flags of nations I Flaunt out, visible as ever, the various ship-signals ! But do you reserve especially for yourself, and for the soul of man, one flag above all the rest, A spiritual woven Signal, for all nations, emblem of man elate above death, Token of all brave captains, and all intrepid sailors and mates, And all that went down doing their duty ; Reminiscent of them twined from all intrepid captains, young or old ; A pennant universal, subtly waying, all time, o'er all brave sailors, All seas, all ships. As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free. AND OTHER POEMS. Entered, according to Act of Congress, iu the year 1872, by WALT WHITMAN, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. S. W. GREEN, Printer, 1G and 18 Jacob Street, New-York. CONTENTS. PAGK PREFACE. v ONE SONG, AMERICA, BEFORE I GO xi SOUVENIRS OF DEMOCRACY xiii As A STRONG BIRD ON PINIONS FREE 1 THE MYSTIC TRUMPETER 8 % O STAR OF FRANCE ! 13 VIRGINIA THE WEST 15 BY BROAD POTOMAC'S SHORE 16 PKEFACE. THE impetus and ideas urging me, for some, years past, to an utterance, or attempt at utterance, of New World songs, and an epic of Democracy, having already had their published expression, as well as I can expect to give it, in LEAVES OF GRASS, the present and any future pieces from me are really but the surplusage forming after that Volume, or the wake eddying behind it. I fulfilled in that an imperious conviction, and the commands of my nature as total and irresistible as those which make the sea flow, or the globe revolve. But of this Supple mentary Volume, I confess I am not so certain. Having from early manhood abandoned the business pursuits and appli cations usual in my time and country, and obediently yielded myself up ever since to the impetus mentioned, and to the work of expressing those ideas, it may be that mere habit has got dominion of me, when there is no real need of saying any thing further. . . . But what is life but an experiment ? and mortality but an exer cise ? with reference to results beyond. And so shall my poems be. If incomplete here, and superfluous there, rfimporte the earnest trial and persistent exploration shall at least be mine, and other success failing, shall be success enough. I have been more anxious, anyhow, to suggest the songs of vital endeavor, and manly evolution, and furnish something for races of out door athletes, than to make perfect rhymes, or reign in the par lors. I ventured from the beginning, my own way, taking chances and would keep on venturing. I will therefore not conceal from any persons, known or un known to me, who take interest in the matter, that I have the ambition of devoting yet a few years to poetic composition. . . . The mighty present age ! To absorb, and express in poetry, any thing of it of its world America cities and States the vi PREFACE. years, the events of our Nineteenth Century the rapidity of movement the violent contrasts, fluctuations of light and shade, of hope and fear the entire revolution made by science in the poetic method these great new underlying facts and new ideas rushing and spreading everywhere ; Truly a mighty age ! As if in some colossal drama, acted again like those of old, under the open sun, the Nations of our time, and all the characteristics of Civilization, seem hurrying, stalking across, flitting from wing to wing, gathering, closing up, toward some long-prepared, most tremendous denouement. Not to conclude the infinite scenas of the race's life and toil and happiness and sorrow, but haply that the boards be cleared from oldest, worst incumbrances, ac cumulations, and Man resume the eternal play anew, and under happier, freer auspices. ... To me, the United States are im portant because, in this colossal drama, they are unquestionably designated for the leading parts, for many a century to come. In them History and Humanity seem to seek to culminate. Our broad areas are even now the busy theatre of plots, passions, interests, and suspended problems, compared to which the in trigues of the past of Europe, the wars of dynasties, the scope of kings and kingdoms, and even the development of peoples, as hitherto, exhibit scales of measurement comparatively narrow and trivial. And on these areas of ours, as on a stage, sooner or later, something like an eclaircissement of all the past civili zation of Europe and Asia is probably to be evolved. The leading parts. . . . Not to be acted, emulated here, by us again, that role till now foremost in History Not to become a conqueror Nation, or to achieve the glory of mere military, or diplomatic, or commercial superiority but to become the grand Producing Land of nobler Men and Women of copious races, cheerful, healthy, tolerant, free To become the most friendly Nation, (the United States indeed,) the modern composite Nation, formed from all, with room for all, welcoming all immi grants accepting the work of our own interior development, as the work fitly filling ages and ages to come ; the leading Na tion of peace, but neither ignorant nor incapable of being the leading Nation of war ; not the Man's Nation only, but the PREFACE. vii Woman's Nation a land of splendid mothers, daughters, sis ters, wives. Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a vast seething mass of materials, ampler, better, (worse also,) than previously known eligible to be used to carry toward its crowning stage, and build for good the great Ideal Nationality of the future, the Nation of the Body and the Soul,* no limit here to land, help, opportunities, mines, products, demands, supplies, &c. ; with (I think) our political organization, National, State, and Municipal, permanently established, as far ahead as we can calculate but, so far, no social, literary, reli gious, or esthetic organizations, consistent with our politics, or becoming to us which organizations can only come, in time, through native schools or. teachers of great Democratic Ideas, Religion through Science, which now, like a new sunrise, as cending, begins to illuminate all and through our own begotten Poets and Literatuses. . . . (The moral of a late well-written book on Civilization seems to be that the only real foundation walls and basis and also sine qua non afterward of true and full Civilization, is the eligibility and certainty of boundless pro ducts for feeding, clothing, sheltering every body perennial fountains of physical and domestic comfort, with intercommu nication, and with civil and ecclesiastical freedom ; and that then the esthetic and mental business will take care of itself. . . . Well, the United States have established this basis, and upon scales of extent, variety, vitality, and continuity, rivaling those of Nature ; and have now to proceed to build an Edifice upon it. I say this Edifice is only to be fitly built by new * The problems of the achievement of this crowning stage through future first-class National Singers, Orators, Artists, and others of creating in lite rature an imaginative New World, the correspondent and counterpart of tho current Scientific and Political New Worlds and the perhaps distant, but still delightful prospect, (for our children, if not in our own day,) of delivering America, and, indeed, all Christian lands everywhere, from the thin, moribund, and watery, but appallingly extensive nuisance of conventional poetry by put ting something really alive and substantial in its place I have undertaken to grapple with, and argue, in DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. viii PREFACE. Literatures, especially the Poetic. I say a modern Image-Making creation is indispensable to fuse and express the modern Politi cal and Scientific creations and then the Trinity will be com plete.) When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my poems, and continued turning over that plan, and shifting it in my mind through many years, (from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five,) experimenting much, and writing and abandoning much, one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain it and its execution ever since and that has been the Religious purpose. Amid many changes, and a formulation taking far different shape from what I at first supposed, this basic purpose has never been departed from in the composition of my verses. Not of course to exhibit itself in the old ways, as in writing hymns or psalms with an eye to the church-pew, or to express conventional pietism, or the sickly yearnings of devotees, but in new ways, and aiming at the widest sub-bases and inclusions of Humanity, and tallying the fresh air of sea and land. I will see, (said I to myself,) whether there is not, for my purposes as poet, a Religion, and a sound Religious germenancy in the average Human Race, at least in their modern development in the United States, and in the hardy common fibre and native yearnings and elements, dceper.and larger, and affording more profitable returns, than all mere sects or churches as boundless, joyous, and vital as Nature itself A germenancy that has too long been unen- couraged, unsung, almost unknown. . . . With Science, the Old Theology of the East, long in its dotage, begins evidently to die and disappear. But (to my mind) Science and may be such will prove its principal service as evidently prepares the way for One indescribably grander Time's young but perfect off spring the New Theology heir of the West lusty and loving, and wondrous beautiful. For America, and for to-day, just the same as any day, the supreme and final Science is the Science of God what we call science being only its minister as Democracy is or shall be also. And a poet of America (I said) must fill him self with such thoughts, and chant his best out of them And as those were the convictions and aims, for good or bad, of PREFA CR. ix LEAVES OF GRASS, they arc no less the intention of this Volume. As there can be, in my opinion, no sane and complete Personality nor any grand and electric Nationality, without the stock ele ment of Religion imbuing all the other elements, (like heat in chemistry, invisible itself, but the life of all visible life,) so there can be no Poetry worthy the name without that element behind all The time has certainly come to begin to discharge the idea of Religion, in the United States, from mere ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays and churches and church-going, and assign it to that general position, chiefest, most indispensable, most ex hilarating, to which the others are to be adjusted, inside of all human character, and education, and affairs. The people, espe cially the young men and women of America, must begin to learn that Religion, (like Poetry,) is something far, far different from what they supposed. It is, indeed, too important to the power and perpetuity of the New World to be consigned any longer to the churches, old or new, Catholic or Protestant Saint this, or Saint that. ... It must be consigned henceforth to Democracy en masse, and to Literature. It must enter into the Poems of ' the Nation. It must make the Nation. The Four Years' War is over and in the peaceful, strong, exciting, fresh occasions of To-day, and of the Future, that strange, sad war is hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of sentries, the prisons, the hospitals, (ah ! the hospitals !) all have passed away all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and living generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating that war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of hatred, conflict, death. So let it be obliterated. I say the life of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all, South, North, East, West. ... To help put the United States (even if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a chant To rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they are to play, and are even now playing to the thought of their great Future, and the attitude conformed to it especially their great Esthetic, Moral, Scientific. Future, (of which their vulgar material and x PREFACE. political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments by an orchestra,) these, as hitherto, are still, for me, among my hopes, ambitions. LEAVES OF GRASS, already published, is, in its intentions, the song of a great composite Democratic Individual, male or female. And following on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my mind to run through the chants of this Volume, (if ever completed,) the thread-voice, more or less audi ble, of an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric Democratic Nationality. Purposing, then, to still fill out, from time to time through years to come, the following Volume, (unless prevented,) I con clude this Preface to the first installment of it, pencilled in the open air, on my fifty-third birth-day, by wafting to you, dear Reader, whoever you are, (from amid the fresh scent of the grass, the pleasant coolness of the forenoon breeze, the lights and shades of tree-boughs silently dappling and playing around me, and the notes of the cat-bird for undertone and accompa niment,) my true good-will and love. Washington, D. C., May 31, 1872. W. W. ONE SONG, AMERICA, BEFORE I GO. ONE song, America, before I go, I'd sing, o'er all the rest, with trumpet sound, For thee the Future. I'd sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality ; I'd fashion thy Ensemble, including Body and Soul; Tel show, away ahead, thy real Union, and how it may be accornplish'd. (The paths to the House I seek to make, But leave to those to come, the House itself.) Belief I sing and Preparation ; As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the Present only, But greater still from what is yet to come, Out of that formula for Thee I sing. SOUVENIRS OF DEMOCRACY. THE business man, the acquirer vast, After assiduous years, surveying results, preparing for departure, Devises houses and lands to his children bequeaths stocks, goods funds for a school or hos pital, Leaves money to certain companions to buy tokens, souvenirs of gems and gold ; Parceling out with care And then, to prevent all cavil r His name to his testament formally signs. But I, my life surveying, With nothing to show, to devise, from its idle years, "Nor houses, nor lands nor tokens of gems or gold for my friends, Only these Souvenirs of Democracy In them in all my songs behind me leaving, To You, whoever you are, (bathing, leavening this leaf especially with my breath pressing on it a moment with my own hands ; Here ! feel how the pulse beats in my wrists I how my heart's-blood is swelling, contract ing !) I will You, in all, Myself, with promise to never desert you, To which I sign my name. AS A STRONG BIRD ON PINIONS FREE. i. As a strong bird on pinions free, Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving, Such be the thought I'd think to-day of thee, America, Such be the recitative I'd bring to-day for thee.* The conceits of the poets of other lands I bring thee not, Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long, Nor rhyme nor the classics nor perfume of foreign . court, or indoor library ; But an odor I'd bring to-day as from forests of pine in the north, in Maine or breath of an Illi nois prairie, With open airs of Virginia, or Georgia, or Tennessee or from Texas uplands, or Florida's glades, With presentment of Yellowstone's scenes, or Yo- semite ; And murmuring tinder, pervading all, I'd bring the rustling sea-sound, That endlessly sounds from the two great seas of the world. * Commencement Poem, Dartmouth College, N. H., June 26, 1872, on invitation United Literary Societies. 2 As A STRONG BIRD And for thy subtler sense, subtler refrains, O Union! Preludes of intellect tallying these and tliee mind- formulas fitted for tliee real, and sane, and large as these and thee ; Thou, mounting higher, diving deeper than we knew thou transcendental Union ! By thee Fact to be justified blended with Thought ; Thought of Man justified blended with God : Through thy Idea lo ! the immortal Reality ! Through thy Eeality lo ! the immortal Idea ! 2, Brain of the New World I what a task is thine ! To formulate the Modern Out of the peerless grandeur of the modern, Out of Thyself comprising Science to recast Poems, Churches, Art, (Recast may-be discard them, end them May-be their work is done who knows ?) By vision, hand, conception, on the background of the mighty past, the dead, To limn, with absolute faith, the mighty living pre sent. (And yet, thou living, present brain ! heir of the dead, the Old World brain ! Thou that lay folded, like an unborn babe, within its folds so long ! Thou carefully prepared by it so long ! haply thou but unfoldest it only maturest it ; It to eventuate in thee the essence of the by-gone time contain'd in thee ; Its poems, churches, arts, unwitting to themselves, destined with reference to thee, The fruit of all the Old, ripening to-day in thee.) N PINIOXS FREE. 3. Sail sail thy best, ship of Democracy ! Of value is thy freight 'tis not the Present only, The Past is also stored in thee ! Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone not of thy western continent alone ; Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship is steadied by thy spars ; With thee Time voyages in trust the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee ; With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou bear'st the other continents ; Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination- port triumphant : Steer, steer with good strong hand and wary eye, helmsman thou carryest great companions, Venerable, priestly Asia sails this day with thee, And royal, feudal Europe sails with thee. Beautiful World of new, superber Birth, that rises to my eyes, Like a limitless golden cloud, filling the \\estern sky ; Emblem of general Maternity, lifted above all ; Sacred shape of the bearer of daughters and sons ; Out of thy teeming womb, thy giant babes in cease less procession issuing, Acceding from such gestation, taking and giving con tinual strength and life ; World of the Real ! world of the twain in one ! World of the Soul born by the world of the real alone led to identity, body, by it alone ; Yet in beginning only incalculable masses of compo site, precious materials, 4 As A STRONG BIRD By history's cycles forwarded by every nation, lan guage, hither sent, Heady, collected here a ireer, vast, electric World, to be constructed here, (The true New World the world of orbic Science, Morals, Literatures to come,) Thou Wonder World, yet undefined, unform'd neither do I define thee ; How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future ? I feel thy ominous greatness, evil as well as good ; I watch thee, advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past ; I see thy light lighting and thy shadow shadowing, as if the entire globe ; But I do not undertake to define thee hardly ta com prehend thee ; I but thee name thee prophecy as now ! I merely thee ejaculate ! Thee in thy future ; Thee in thy only permanent life, career thy own unloosen'd mind thy soaring spirit ; Thee as another equally needed sun, America ra diant, ablaze, swift-moving, fructifying all ; Thee ! risen in thy potent cheerfulness and joy thy endless, great hilarity ! (Scattering for good the cloud that hung so long that weigh'd so long upon the mind of man, The doubt, suspicion, dread, of gradual, certain deca dence of man ;) Thee in thy larger, saner breeds of Female, Male thee in thy athletes, moral, spiritual, South, North, West, East, (To thy immortal breasts, Mother of All, thy every daughter, son, endear' d alike, forever equal ;) Thee in thy own musicians, singers, artists, unborn yet, but certain ; o.v P/AYO.VS FREE. 5 Thee in thy moral wealth and civilization, (until which thy proudest material wealth and civiliza tion must remain in vain ;) Thee in thy all-supplying, all-enclosing "Worship thee in no single bible, saviour, merely, Thy saviours countless, latent within thyself thy bibles incessant, within thyself, equal to any, divine as any ; Thee in an education grown of thee in teachers, studies, students, born of thee ; Thee in thy democratic fetes, en masse thy high original festivals, operas, lecturers, preachers ; Thee in thy ultimata, (the preparations only .now completed the edifice on sure foundations tied,) Thee in thy pinnacles, intellect, thought thy top most rational joys thy love, and godlike aspira tion, In thy resplendent coming literati thy full-lung'd orators thy sacerdotal bards kosmic savans, These ! these in thee, (certain to come,) to-day I pro phecy. Land tolerating all accepting all not for the good alone all good .for thee ; Land in the realms of God to be a realm unto thy self ; Under the rule of God to be a rule unto thyself. (Lo ! where arise three peerless stars, To be thy natal stars, my country Ensemble Evo lution Freedom , Set in the sky of Law.) 6 As A STRONG BIRD Land of unprecedented f aitli God's faith ! Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav'd ; The general inner earth, so long, so sedulously draped over, now and hence for what it is, boldly laid bare, Open'd by thee to heaven's light, for benefit or bale. Not for success alone ; Not to fair-sail un intermitted always ; The storm shall dash thy face the murk of war, and worse than war, shall cover thee all over ; (Wert capable of war its tug and trials ? Be capa ble of peace, its trials ; For the tug and mortal strain of nations come at last in peace not war ;) In many a smiling mask death shall approach, be guiling thee thou in disease shalt -swelter ; The livid cancer spread its hideous claws, clinging upon thy breasts, seeking to strike thee deep within ; Consumption of the worst moral consumption shall rouge thy face with hectic : But thou shalt face thy fortunes, thy diseases, and surmount them all, Whatever they are to-day, and whatever through time they may be, They each and all shall lift, and pass away, and cease from thee ; While thou, Time's spirals rounding out of thyself, thyself still extricating, fusing, Equable, natural, mystical Union thou (the mortal with immortal blent,) Shalt soar toward the fulfilment of the future the spirit of the body and the mind, The Soul its destinies. The Soul, its destinies the real real, (Purport of all these apparitions of the real ;) ON PINIONS FREE. 7 In tliee, America, tlie Soul, its destinies ; Thou globe of globes ! thou wonder nebulous*! By many a throe of heat and cold convuls'd (by these thyself solidifying ;) Thou mental, moral orb ! thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World ! The Present holds thee not for such vast growth as thine for such unparallel'd flight as thine, The Future only holds thee, and can hold thee. THE MYSTIC TRUMPETER. 1. HARK ! some wild trumpeter some strange musician, Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to night. I hear tliee, trumpeter listening, alert, I catch thy notes, Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me, JSTow low, subdued now in the distance lost. 2. Come nearer, bodiless one haply, in thee resounds Some dead composer haply thy pensive life Was fill'd with aspirations high unform'd ideals, Waves, oceans musical, chaotically surging, That now, ecstatic ghost, close to me bending, thy cornet echoing, pealing, Gives out to no one's ears but mine but freely gives to mine, That I may thec translate. 3. Blow, trumpeter, free and clear I follow thee, While at thy liquid prelude, glad, serene, The fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day, withdraw ; THE MYSTIC TRUMPETER. Q A holy calm descends, like dew, upon me, I walk, in cool refreshing night, the walks of Para dise, I scent the grass, the moist air, and the roses ; Thy song expands my numb'd, unbonded spirit thou freest, launchest me, Floating and basking upon Heaven's lake. 4. Blow again, trumpeter ! and for my sensuous eyes, Bring the old pageants show the feudal world. What charm thy music works! thou makest pass be fore me, Ladies and cavaliers long dead barons are in their castle halls the troubadours are singing ; Arm'd knights go forth to redress wrongs some in quest of the Holy Graal : I see the tournament I see the contestants, encased in heavy armor, seated on stately, champing horses ; I hear the shouts the sounds of blows and smiting steel : I see the Crusaders' tumultuous armies Hark ! how the cymbals clang ! Lo ! where the monks walk in advance, bearing the cross on high ! 5. Blow again, trumpeter ! and for thy theme, Take now the enclosing theme of all the solvent and the setting ; Love, that is pulse of all the sustenance and the pang ; 10 THE JTrsr/c TRUMPETER. The heart of man and woman all for love : No other theme but love knitting, enclosing, fusing love. O, how the immortal phantoms crowd around me ! B the vast alembic ever working I see and know the flames that heat the world ; The glow, the blush, the beating hearts of lov; . So blissful happy some and some so silent, dark, and nigh to death : Love, that is all the earth to lovers Love, that mocks time and space : Love, that is day and night Love, that is sun and moon and stars ; Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume ; i-ther words, but words of love no other thought bnt Love. 6. Blow again, trumpeter conjure war's wild alarums. Swift to thy spell, a shuddering hum like distant thunder ro. Lo ! where the arm'd men hasten Lo ! mid the clouds of dust, the glint of bayonets : I see the grime-faced cannoniers I mark the rosy flash amid the smoke I hear the cracking of the ^gnns: ^N or war alone thy fearful music-song, wild player, brings every sight of fear, The deeds of ruthless brigands rapine, murder I hear the cries for help"! I see ships foundering at sea I behold on deck, and below deck, the terrible tableaux. THE J/r.s-77c- TRUMPETER. 11 trumpeter ! methinks I am myself the instrument thou playest ! Thou rnelt*st"my heart, my brain thou movest, draw- est, changest them, at will : And now thy sullen notes send darkness through me ; Thou takest"away all cheering light all hope : 1 see the enslaved, the overthrown, the hurt, the op- prest of the whole earth ; I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race it becomes all mine ; Mine too the revenges of humanity the wrongs of ages baffled feuds and hatreds"; Utter defeat upon me weighs all lost ! the foe vic torious ! Yet 7 inid the ruins Pride colossal stands, unshaken to the last ; Endurance, resolution, to the last.) Xow, trumpeter, for thy close, Vouchsafe a higher strain than any yet ; Sing to my soul renew its languishing faith and hope ; Rouse up niy slow belief give me some vision of the future ; Give me. for once, its prophecy and joy. O glad, exulting, culminating song ! A victor more than earth's is in thy notes ! Marches of victory man disenthralTd the con queror at last ! 12 THE MYSTIC TRUMPETER. Hymns to the universal God, from universal Man all joy ! A reborn race appears a perfect World, all joy ! Women and Men, in wisdom, innocence and health all joy ! Riotous, laughing bacchanals, fill'cl with joy ! War, sorrow, Buffering gone The rank earth purged nothing but joy left ! The ocean fill'd with joy the atmosphere all joy ! Joy ! Joy ! in freedom, worship, love ! Joy in the ecstacy of life ! Enough to merely be ! Enough to breathe ! Joy ! Joy ! all over Joy ! O STAR OF FRANCE! 1870-71. 1. O STAE of France ! The brightness of thy hope and strength and fame, Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long, Beseems to-day a wreck, driven by the gale a mast- less hulk ; And 'mid its teeming, madden'd, half-drown'd crowds, Nor helm nor helmsman. 2. Dim, smitten star ! Orb not of t France alone pale symbol of my soul, its dearest hopdS, The struggle and the daring rage-divine for liberty, Of aspirations toward the far ideal enthusiast's dreams of brotherhood, Of terror to the tyrant and the priest. 3. Star crucified ! by traitors sold ! Star panting o'er a land of death heroic land ! Strange, passionate, mocking, frivolous land. Miserable ! yet for thy errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke thee ; Thy unexampled woes and pangs have quell'd them all, And left thee sacred. 14 STAR OF FRANCE ! In that amid thy many faults, thou ever aimedst highly, In that thou wouldst not really sell thyself, however great the price, In that thou surely wakedst weeping from thy drugg'd sleep, In that alone, among thy sisters, thou, Giantess, didst rend the ones that shamed thee, In that thou couldst not, wouldst not, wear the usual chains, This cross, thy livid face, thy pierced hands and feet, The spear thrust in thy side. 4. O star ! O ship of France, beat back and baffled long ! Bear up, O smitten orb ! ship, continue on ! Sure, as the ship of all, the Earth itself, Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos, Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons, Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty, Onward, beneath the sun, following its course, So thee, O ship of France ! Finished the days, the clouds dispell'd, The travail o'er, the long-sought extrication, When lo ! reborn, high o'er the European world, (In gladness, answering thence, as face- afar to face, reflecting ours, Columbia,) Again thy star, France fair, lustrous star, In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever, Shall beam immortal. VIRGINIA THE WEST. 1. THE noble Sire, fallen on evil days, I saw, with hand uplifted, menacing, brandishing, (Memories of old in abeyance love and faith in abeyance,) The insane knife toward the Mother of All. 2. The noble Son, on sinewy feet advancing, I saw out of the land of prairies land of Ohio's waters, and of Indiana, To the rescue, the stalwart giant, hurry his plenteous offspring, Drest in blue, bearing their trusty rifles on their shoulders. 3. Then the Mother of All, with calm voice speaking, As to you, Virginia, (I seemed to hear her say,) why strive against me and why seek my life \ When you yourself forever provide to defend me ? For you provided me Washington and now these also. BY BROAD POTOMACS SHORE. 1. BY broad Potomac's shore again, old tongue ! (Still littering still ejaculating canst never cease this babble ?) Again, old heart so gay again to you, your sense, the full flush spring returning ; Again the freshness and the odors again Virginia's summer sky, pellucid blue and silver, Again the forenoon purple of the hills, Again the deathless grass, so noiseless, soft and green, Again the blood-red roses blooming. Perfume this book of mine, O blood-red roses ! Lave subtly with your waters every line, Potomac ! Give me of you, O spring, before I close, to put between its pages ! O forenoon purple of the hills, before I close, of you ! O smiling earth O summer sun, give me of you ! deathless grass, of you ! MEMORANDA BY WALT WHITMAN. Author* x Publication. 187, r > '70. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by WALT WHITMAN, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. NKAV REPUBLIC PUINT, Federal St., CHUN leu MEMORANDA, &c. DURING the Union War I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through '63, '64 and '65, to visit the sick and wounded of the Army, both on the field and in the Hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil to re fresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these I brief'd cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bedside, and not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Of the present Volume most of it's pages are verbatim renderings from such pencillings on the spot. Some were scratch'd down from narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending some body amid those scenes. I have perhaps forty such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the reader the associa tions that attach to these soil'd and creas'd little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten'd with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by during the War, blotclrd here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. 'Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me. Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history. Some pang of anguish some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote. Out of them arise active and breathing forms. They sum mon up, even in this silent and vacant room as I write, not only the sinewy regiments and brigades, marching or in camp, but the countless phantoms of those who fell and were hastily buried by wholesale in the battle-pits, or whose dust and bones have been since removed to the National Ceme teries of the land, especially through Virginia and Tennes see. (Not, Northern soldiers only many indeed the Caro linian, Georgian, Alabatnian, Louisianian, Virginian many a Southern face and form, pale, emaciated, with that strange tie of confidence and love between us, welded by sickness, pain of wounds, and little daily, nightly offices of nursing and friendly words and visits, comes up amid the rest, and does 4 MEMORANDA not mar, but rounds and gives a finish to the meditation.) Yivid as life, they recall and identify the long Hospital Wards, with their myriad-varied scenes of day or night the graphic incidents of field or camp the night before the bat tle, with many solemn yet cool preparations the changeful exaltations and depressions of those four years, North and South the convulsive memories, (let but a word, a broken sentence, serve to recall them) the clues already quite van- ish'd, like some old dream, and yet the list significant enough to soldiers the scrawl'd, worn slips of paper that came up by bushels from the Southern prisons, Salisbury or Anderson- ville, by the hands of exchanged prisoners the clank of crutches on the pavements or floors of Washington, or UD and down the stairs of the Paymasters' offices the Grand Review of homebound veterans at the close of the War, cheerily marching day after day by the President's house, one brigade succeeding another until it seem'd as if they would never end the strange squads of Southern desert ers, (escapees, I call'd them ;) that little genre group, un- reck'd amid the mighty whirl, I remember passing in a hos pital corner, of a dying Irish boy, a Catholic priest, and an improvised altar Four years compressing centuries of native passion, first-class pictures, tempests of life and death an inexhaustible mine for the Histories, Drama, Eomance and even Philosophy of centuries to come indeed the Verteber of Poetry and Art, (of personal character too,) for all future America, (far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than H'bmer's siege of Troy, or the French wars to Shakspere ;) and looking over all, in my remem brance, the tall form of President Lincoln, with his face of deep-cut lines, with the large, kind, canny eyes, the com plexion of dark brown, and the tinge of wierd melancholy saturating all. More and more, in my recollections of that period, and through its varied, multitudinous oceans and murky whirls, appear the central resolution and sternness of the bulk of the average American People, animated in Soul by a defi nite purpose, though sweeping and fluid as some great storm the Common People, emblemised in thousands of specimens of first-class Heroism, steadily accumulating, (no regiment, no company, hardly a file of men, North or South, the last three years, without such first-class specimens.) I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others to me the main interest of the War, I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in those specimens, and in the ambulance, the Hospital, and even the dead on the field. To me, the points illustrating the latent Personal Character and eligi bilities of These States, in the two or three millions of Ameri can young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in the armies and especially the one-third or one-fourth of DURING THE WAR. 5 their number, stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest were of more significance even than the Political interests involved. (As so much of a Race depends on what it thinks of death, and how it stands per sonal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, &c., we get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more formal history.) Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and in teriors, (not the few great battles) of the Secession War ; and it is best they should not. In the mushy influences of cur rent times the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch'd by the side of a sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his eyes flash and burn as he recurr'd to the cruelties on his surrender'd bro ther, and mutilations of the corpse afterward. [See, in the following pa^es, the incident at Upperville the seventeen, kill'd as in the description, were left there on the ground. After they dropt dead, no one touch'd them all were made sure of, however. The carcasses were left for the citizens to bury or not, as they chose.] Such was the War. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written. Its prac ticality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual Soldier of 1862-'65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, prac tices, tastes, language, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp I say, will never be written perhaps must not and should not'be. The present Memoranda may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life, and into those lurid interiors of the period, never to be fully convey'd to the future. For that purpose, and for what goes along with it, the Hospital part of the drama from '61 to '65, deserves indeed to be recorded (I but suggest it.) Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its mo ments of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the in terminable campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green armies, the drafts and bounties the immense money expenditure, like a heavy pouring constant rain with, over the whole land, the last three years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Hospitals (it seem'd sometimes as if the whole in terest of the land, North and South, was one vast central Hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges) those forming the Untold and Unwritten His.tory of the War in- 6 MEMORANDA finitely greater (like Life's) than the few scraps and distor tions that are ever told or written. Think how much, and of importance, will be how much, civic and military, has already been buried in the grave, in eternal darkness ! But to my Memoranda. FALMOUTH, YA., opposite Fredericksburgh, December 21, 1862. Began my visits among the Camp Hospitals in the Army of the Potomac. Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion, on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a Hospital since the battle Seems to have receiv'd only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of ampu tated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover'd with its brown woollen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel-staves or broken board, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported ]S"orth to their friends.) The large mansion is quite crowded, upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no sys tem, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done ; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississip- pian a captain hit badly in leg, I talk'd with some time ; he ask'd me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward in Washington, with his leg ampu tated, doing well.) I went through the rooms, down stairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk'd to three or tour, who seem'd most susceptible to it, and needing it. (Everything is quiet now, here about Falmouth and the Rappahannock, but there was noise enough a week or so ago. Probably the earth never shook by artificial means, nor the air reverberated, more than on that winter daybreak of eight or nine days since, when Gen. Burnside order'd all the bat teries of the army to combine for the bombardment of Fred- ericksburgh. It was in its way the most magnificent and terrible spectacle, with all the adjunct of sound, throughout the War, The perfect hush of the just-ending night was sud denly broken by the first gun, and in an instant all the thunderers, big and little, were in full chorus, which they kept up without intermission for several hours.) December 23 to 31. The results of the late battles are ex hibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases, (hun dreds die every day,) in the Camp, Brigade, and Division Hospitals. These are merely tents, and sometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blankets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs or DURING THE WAR. 7 small leaves. No cots ; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. The ground is frozen hard, and there is occa sional snow. I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good, but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him ; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it. Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes. These are curious shows, full of characters and groups. I soon get acquainted anywhere in camp, with officers or men, and am always well used. Some times I go down on picket with the regiments I know best As to rations, the army here at present seems to be tolerably well supplied, and the men have enough, such as it is, mainly salt pork and hard tack. Most of the regi ments lodge in the flimsy little shelter-tents. A few have built themselves huts of logs and mud, with fireplaces. WASHINGTON, January, '63. Left camp at Falmouth, with some wounded, a few days since, and came here by Aquia Creek railroad, and so on Government steamer up the Potomac. Many wounded were with us on the cars and boat. The cars were just common platform ones. The rail road journey often or twelve miles was made mostly before sunrise. The soldiers guarding the road came out from their tents or shebangs of bushes with rumpled hair and half- awake look. Those on duty were walking their posts, some on banks over us, others down far below the level of the track. I saw large cavalry camps off the road. At Aquia Creek landing were numbers of wounded going North. While I waited some three hours, I went around among them. Several wanted word sent home to parents, brothers, wives, &c., ^hich I did for them, (by mail the next day from Washington.) On the boat I had my hands full. One poor fellow died going up. I am now remaining in and around Washington, daily visiting the hospitals. Am much in Patent Office, Eighth street, H street, Armory Square and others. Am now able to do a little good, having money, (as almoner of others home,) and getting experience To-day, Sunday after noon and till nine in the evening, visited Campbell Hospital ; attended specially to one case in Ward 1 ; very sick with pleurisy and typhoid fever; young man, farmer's son, D. F. Russell, Company E, Sixtieth New York ; downhearted And feeble ; a long time before he would take any interest ; wrote a letter home to his mother, in Malone, Franklin County, N. T., at his request ; gave him some fruit and one or two other gifts: envelop'd and directed his letter, &c Then went thoroughly through Ward 6 ; observ'd every 8 MEMORANDA case in the Ward, without, I think, missing one ; gave per haps from twenty to thirty persons, each one some little gift, such as oranges, apples, sweet crackers, figs, &c. TJmrsday, Jan. 21. Devoted the main part of the day to Armory Square Hospital ; went prett} r thoroughly through Wards F, G, H, and I ; some fifty cases in each Ward. In Ward F supplied the men throughout with writing paper and stamp'd envelope each ; distributed in small portions, to proper subjects, a large jar of first-rate preserv'd berries, which had been donated to me by a lady her own cooking. Found several cases I thought good subjects for small sums of money, which I furnish'd. (The wounded men often come up broke, and it helps their spirits to have even the small sum I give them.) My paper and envelopes all gone, but distributed a good lot of amusing reading matter ;"also, as I thought judicious, tobacco, oranges, apples, &c. In teresting cases in Ward I ; Charles Miller, bed No. 19, Com pany D, Fifty-third Pennsylvania, is only sixteen years of age, very bright, courageous boy, left leg amputated below the knee; next bed to him, another young lad very sick; gave each appropriate gifts. In the bed above, also, ampu tation of the left leg ; gave him a little jar of raspberries ; bed No. 1, this Ward, gave a small sum ; also to a soldier on crutches, sitting on his bed near (I am more and more surprised at the very great proportion of youngsters from fifteen to twenty-one in the army. I afterwards found a still greater proportion among the Southerners.) Evening, same day, went to see D. F. R., before alluded to; found him remarkably changed for the better; up and dress 'd quite a triumph ; he afterwards got. well, and went back to his regiment Distributed in the Wards a quantity of note-paper, and forty or fifty stamp'd envelopes, of which I had recruited my stock, and the men were much in need. Fifty Hours Left Wounded on the Field. Here is a case of a soldier I found among the crowded cots in the Patent Office.. He likes to have some one to talk to, and we will listen to him . He got badly hit in his leg and side at Freder- icksburgh that eventful Saturday, 13th of December. He lay the'succeeding two days and nights helpless on the field, between the city and those grim terraces of batteries ; his company and regiment had been compell'd to leave him to his fate. To make matters worse, it happen'd he lay with his head slightly down hill, and could not help himself. At the end of some fifty hours he was brought off, with other wounded, under a flag of truce I ask him how the rebels treated him as he lay during those two days and nights within reach of them whether they came to him whether they abused him? He answers that several of the rebels, soldiers and others, came to him, at one time and another. DURING THE WAR. 9 A couple of them, who were together, spoke roughly and sarcastically, but nothing worse. One middle-aged man, however, who seem'd to be moving around the field, among the dead and wounded, for benevolent purposes, came to him in a way he will never forget; treated our soldier kindly, bound up his wounds, cheer'd him, gave him a couple of biscuits, and a drink of whiskey and water ; ask'd him if he could eat some beef. This good Secesh, however, did not change our soldier's position, for it might have caused the blood to burst from the wounds, clotted and stagnated. Our soldier is from Pennsylvania; has had a pretty severe time ; the wounds proved to be bad ones. But he retains a good heart, and is at present on the gain (It is not uncommon for the men to remain on the field this way, one, two, or even four or five days.) Letter Writing. When eligible, I encourage the men to write, and myself, when call'd upon, write all sorts of letters for them, (including love letters, very tender ones.) Almost as I reel off this memoranda, I write for a new patient to his wife. M. de F., of the Seventeenth Connecticut, Com pany H, has just come up (February 17) from Windmill Point, and is received in Ward H, Armory Square. He is an intelligent looking man, has a foreign accent, black-eyed and hair'd, a Hebraic appearance. Wants a telegraphic message sent to his wife, New Canaan, Ct. I agree to send the message but to make things sure, I also sit down and write the wife a letter, and despatch it to the post-office im mediately, as he fears she will come on, and he does not wish her to, as he will surely get well. Saturday, Jan. 30. Afternoon, visited Campbell Hospital. Scene of cleaning up the Ward, and giving the men all clean clothes through the Ward (6) the patients dressing or be ing dress'd the naked upper half of the bodies the good- humor and fun the shirts, drawers, sheets of beds, &c., and the general fixing up for Sunday. Gave J. L. 50 cts. Wednesday, Feb. 4th. Visited Armory Square Hospital, went pretty thoroughly through Wards E and D. Supplied paper and envelopes to all who wish'd as usual, found plenty of the men who needed those articles. Wrote letters. Saw and talk'd with two or three members of the Brooklyn Fourteenth A poor fellow in Ward D, with a fearful wound in a fearful condition, was having some loose splin ters of bone taken from the neighborhood of the wound. The operation was long, and one of great pain yet, after it was well commenced, the soldier bore it in silence. He sat up, propp'd was much wasted had lain a long time quiet in one position, (not for days only, but weeks,) a bloodless, brown-skinn'dface, with eyes full of determination belongM to a New York regiment. There was an unusual cluster oi surgeons, medical cadets, nurses, &c., around his bed 1 2 10 MEMORANDA thought the whole thing was done with tenderness, and done well. In one case, the wife sat by the side of her husband, his sickness, typhoid fever, pretty bad. In another, by the side of her son a mother she told me she had seven children, and this was the youngest. (A fine, kind, healthy, gentle mother, good-looking, not very old, with a cap on her head, and dress'd like home what a charm it gave to the whole Ward.) I liked the woman nurse in Ward E I noticed how she sat a long time by a poor fellow who just had, that morning, in addition to his other sickness, bad hemmorhage she gently assisted him, reliev'd him of the blood, holding a cloth to his mouth, as he cough'd it up he was so weak he could only just turn his head over on the pillow. One young New York man, with a bright, handsome face, had been lying several months from a most disagreeable wound, receiv'd at Bull Kun. A bullet had shot him right through the bladder, hitting him front, low in the belly, and coming out back. He had suffer'd much the wa ter came out of the wound, by slow but steady quantities, for many weeks so that he lay almost constantly in a sort of puddle and there were other disagreeable circumstances. He was of good heart, however. At present comparatively comfortable ; had a bad throat, was delighted with a stick of horehound candy I gave him, with one or two other trifles. Feb. 23. 1 must not let the great Hospital at the Patent Office pass away without some mention. A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Wash ington buildings, was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there many times. It was a strange, solemn and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I go sometimes at night to soothe and relieve particular cases. Two of the immense apartments are fill'd with high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter'd into the mind of man to conceive ; and with curiosities and foreign presents. Be tween these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide, and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick ; besides a great long double row of them up and down through the middle of the hall. Many of them were very bad cases, wounds and amputations. Then there was a gallery running above the hall, in which there were beds also. It was, in deed, a curious scene at night, when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, the gallery above, and the marble pavement under foot the suffering, and the forti tude to bear it in various degrees occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repressed sometimes a poor fel low dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by DURING THE WAR. 11 his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative such were the sights but lately in the Patent Office. The wounded have since been removed from there, and it is now vacant again. The White House, by Moonlight Feb. 24. A spell of fine soft weather. I wander about a good deal, especially at night, under the moon. To-night took a long look at the President's House and here is my splurge about it. The white portico the brilliant gas-light shining the palace- like portico the tall, round columns, spotless as snow the walls also the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint languishing shades, not shadows everywhere too a soft transparent haze, a thin blue moon-lace, hanging in the night in the air the brilliant and extra plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the facade, columns, portico, &c. everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet soft the White House f future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon the pure and gorgeous front, in the trees, under the night-lights, under the lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of illusion The forms of the trees, leafless, silent, in trunk and myriad-angles of branches, under the stars and sky the White House of the land, the White House of the night, and of beauty and silence sentries at the gates, and by the portico, silent, pacing there in blue overcoats stop ping you not at all, but eyeing you with sharp eyes, which ever way you move. An Army Hospital Ward. Let me specialize a visit I made to the collection of barrack-like one-story edifices, call'd Campbell Hospital, out on the flats, at the end of the then horse-railway route, on Seventh street. There is a long building appropriated to each Ward. Let us go into Ward 6. It contains to-day, I should judge, eighty or a hundred patients, half sick, half wounded. The edifice is nothing but boards, well whitewash'd inside, and the usual slender- framed iron bedsteads, narrow and plain. You walk down the central passage, with a row on either side, their feet to ward you, and their heads to the wall. There are fires in large stoves, and the prevailing white of the walls is reliev'd by some ornaments, stars, circles, &c., made of evergreens. The view of the whole edifice and occupants can be taken at once, for there is no partition. You may hear groans, or other sounds of unendurable suffering, from two or three of the iron cots, but in the main there is quiet- almost a pain ful absence of demonstration ; but the pallid face, the dull'd eye, and the moisture on the lip, are demonstration enough. Most of these sick or hurt are evidently young fellows from the country, farmers' sons, and such like. Look at the fine large frames, the bright and broad countenances, and the many yet lingering proofs of strong constitution and physique. 12 MEMORANDA Look at the patient and mute manner of our American wounded, as they lie in such a sad collection ; representa tives from all New England, and from New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania indeed, from all the States and all the cities largely from the West. Most of them are entirely without friends or acquaintances here no familiar face, and hardly a word of judicious sympathy or cheer, through their sometimes long and tedious sickness, or the /pangs of aggravated wounds. t A Connecticut Case. This young man in bed 25 is H. D. B., of the Twenty-seventh Connecticut, Company B. His folks live at Northford, near New Haven. Though not more than twenty-one, or thereabouts, he has knock'd much around the world, on sea and land, and has seen some fighting on both. When I first saw him he was very sick, with no appetite. He declined offers of money said he did not need anything. As I was quite anxious to do something, he confess'd that he had a hankering for a good home-made rice pudding thought he could relish it better than anything. At this time his stomach was very weak. (The doctor, whom I consulted, said nourishment would do him more good than anything ; but things in the hospital, though better than usual, revolted him.) I soon procured B. his rice-pudding. A Washington lady, (Mrs. O'C.), hearing his wish, made the pudding her self, and I took it up to him the next day. He subsequently told me he lived upon it for three or four days This B. is a good sample of the American Eastern voung man the typical Yankee. I took a fancy to him, and gave him a nice Sipe, for a keepsake. He receiv'd afterwards a box of things 'om home, and nothing would do but I must take dinner with him, which I did, and a very good one it was. Two Brooklyn Boys. Here in this same Ward are two young men from Brooklyn, members ol the Fifty-first New York. I had known both the two as young lads at home, so they seem near to me. One of them, J. L., lies there with an amputated arm, the stump healing pretty well. (I saw him lying on the ground at Fredericksburgh last Decem ber, all bloody, just after the arm was taken off. He was very phlegmatic about it, munching away at a cracker in the remaining hand made no fuss.) He will recover, and thinks and talks yet of meeting the Johnny Rebs. A Secesh Brave. The brave, grand soldiers are not com prised in those of one side, any more than the other. Here is a sample of an unknown Southerner, a lad of seventeen. At the War Department, a few days ago, I witness'd a pre sentation of captured flags to the Secretary. Among others a soldier named Gaut, of the One Hundred and Fourth Ohio Volunteers, presented a rebel battle-flag, which one of the officers stated to me was borne to the mouth of our cannon and planted there by a boy but seventeen years of age, who DURING THE WAR. 13 actually endeavor'd to stop the muzzle of the gun with fence- rails. He was kill'd in the effort, and the flag-staff was sev- er'd by a shot from one of our men. (Perhaps, in that Southern boy of seventeen, untold in history, unsung in poems, altogether unnamed, fell as strong a spirit, and as sweet, as any in all time.) The Wounded from Chancellor sville. May, '63. As I write this, the wounded have begun to arrive from Hooker's com mand from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first arrivals. The men in charge of them told me the bad cases were yet to come. If that is so I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought to see the scene of the wounded arriving at the landing here foot of Sixth street, at night. Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain'd a long and violent shower. The poor, pale, helpless soldiers had been debark'd, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them ; at any rate they were exposed to it. The few torches light up the spectacle. All around on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The at tendants are few, and at night few outsiders also only a few hard-worked transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. ISTear by, the ambu lances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call'd to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be sup- press'd, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance To day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next dav more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive" at the rate of 1000 a day. May 12 A Night Battle, over a week since. We already talk of Histories of the War, (presently to accumulate) yes technical histories of some things, statistics, official re ports, and so on but shall we ever get histories of the real things ? There was part of the late battle at Chancellors ville, (second Fredericksbursh,) a little over a week ago, Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday, under Gen.. Joe Hooker, I would like to give just a glimpse of (a moment's look in a terrible storm at sea of which a few suggestions are enough, and full details impossible.) The fighting had been very hot during the day, and after an intermission the latter part, was resumed at night, and kept up with furious energy till 3 o'clock in the morning. That afternoon (Satur day) an attack sudden and strong by Stonewall Jackson had 14 MEMORANDA gain'd a great advantage to the Southern army, and broken our lines, entering us like a wedge, and leaving things in that position at dark. " But Hooker at 11 at night made a desper ate push, drove the Secesh forces back, restored his original lines, and resumed his plans. This night scrimmage was very exciting, and afforded countless strange and fearful pictures. The lighting had been general both at Chancel- lorsville and northeast at Fredericksburgh. (We hear of some poor fighting, episodes, skedaddling on our part. I think not of it. I think of the fierce bravery, the general rule.) One Corps, the 6th, Sedge wick's, fights four dashing and bloody battles in 36 hours, retreating in great jeopardy, losing largely and maintaining itself, fighting with the stern est desperation under all circumstances, getting over the Eappahannock only by the skin of its teeth, yet getting over. It lost many, many brave men, yet it took vengeance, ample vengeance. But it was the tug of Saturday evening, and through the night and Sunday morning, I wanted to make a special note of. It was largely in the woods, and quite a general engage ment. The night was very pleasant, at times the moon shining out full and clear, all Nature so calm in itself, the early summer grass so rich, and foliage of the trees yet there the battle raging, and many good fellows lying help less, with new accessions to them, and every minute amid the rattle of muskets and crash of cannon, (for there was an artillery contest too,) the red life-blood oozing out from heads or trunks or limbs upon that green and dew-cool grass. The woods take fire, and many of the wounded, unable to move, (especially some of the divisions in the Sixth Corps,) are consumed quite large spaces are swept over, burning the dead also some of the men have their hair and beards singed some, splatches of burns on their faces and hands others holes burnt in their clothing The flashes of fire from the cannon, the quick flaring flames and smoke, and the immense roar the musketry so general, the light nearly bright enough for each side to see one another the crashing, tramping of men the yelling close quarters we hear the becesh yells our men cheer loudly back, especi ally if Hooker is in sight hand to hand conflicts, each side stands up to it, brave, determin'd as demons, they often charge upon us a thousand deeds are done worth to write newer greater poems on and still the woods on fire still many are not only scorch'd too many, unable to move, are burn'd to death Then the camp of the wounded O heavens, what scene is this ? is this indeed humanity these butchers' shambles? There are several of them. There they lie, in the largest, in an open space in the woods, from 500 to 600 poor fellows the groans and screams the odor of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the DURING THE WAR. 15 grass, the trees that Slaughter-house ! well is it their mothers, their sisters cannot see them cannot conceive, and never conceiv'd, these things One man is shot by a shell, both in the arm and leg both are amputated there lie the rejected members. Some have their legs blown off- some bullets through the breast some indescribably hor rid wounds in the face or head, all mutilated, sickening, torn, gouged out some in the abdomen some mere boys here is one his face colorless as chalk, lying perfectly still, a bullet has perforated the abdomen life is ebbing fast, there is no help for him. In the camp of the wounded are many rebels, badly hurt they take their regular turns with the rest, just the same as any the surgeons use them just the same Such is the camp of the wounded such a fragment, a reflection afar off of the bloody scene while over all the clear, large moon comes out at times softly, quietly shining. Such, amid the woods, that scene of flitting souls amid the crack and crash and yelling sounds the impalpable per fume of the woods and yet the pungent, stifling smoke- shed with the radiance of the moon, the round, maternal queen, looking from heaven at intervals so placid the sky so heavenly the clear-obscure up there, those buoyant up per oceans a few large placid stars beyond, coming out and then disappearing the melancholy, draperied night above, around And there, upon the roads, the fields, and in those woods, that contest, never one more desperate in any age or land both parties now in force masses no fancy battle, no semi-play, but fierce and savage demons fighting there courage and scorn of death the rule, excep tions almost none. What history, again I say, can ever give for who can know, the mad, determin'd tussle of the armies, in all their separate large and little squads as this each steep'd from crown to toe in desperate, mortal purports ? Who know the conflict hand-to-hand the many conflicts in the dark, those shadowy-tangled, flashing-moonbeam 'd woods the writhing groups and squads hear through the woods the cries, the din, the cracking guns and pistols the distant cannon the cheers and calls, and threats and awful music of the oaths the indiscribable mix the officers' orders, persuasions, en couragementsthe devils fully rous'd in human hearts the strong word, Charge, men, charge the flash of the naked sword, and many a flame and smoke And still the broken, clear and clouded heaven and still again the moonlight pouring silvery soft its radiant patches overall? Who paint the scene, the sudden partial panic of the afternoon, at dusk ? Who paint the irrepressible advance of the Sec ond Division of the Third Corps, under Hooker himself, suddenly order'd up those rapid-filing phantoms through 10 MEMORANDA the woods ? Who show what moves there in the shadows, fluid and firm to save, (and it did save,) the Army's name, perhaps the Nation ? And there the veterans hold the field. (Brave Berry falls not yet but Death has mark'd him soon he falls.) Of scenes like these, I say, who writes who e'er can write, the story ? Of many a score aye, thousands, North and South, of unwrit heroes, unknown heroisms, incredible, impromptu, first-class desperations who tells ? No history, ever No poem sings, nor music sounds, those bravest men of all those deeds. No formal General's report, nor print, nor book in the library, nor column in the paper, embalms the bravest, North or South, East or West. Unnamed, un known, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers. Our manliest our boys our hardy darlings. Indeed no picture gives them. Likely their very names are lost. Likely, the typic one of them, (standing, no doubt, for hundreds, thou sands,) crawls aside to some bush-clump, or ferny tuft, on receiving his death-shot there, sheltering a little while, soaking roots, grass and soil with red blood the battle ad vances, retreats, flits from the scene, sweeps by and there, haply with pain and suffering, (yet less, far less, than is sup posed,) the last lethargy winds like a serpent round him the eyes glaze in death none recks Perhaps the burial- squads, in truce, a week afterwards, search not the secluded spot And there, at last, the Bravest Soldier crumbles in the soil of mother earth, unburied and unknown. June 18. In one of the Hospitals I find Thomas Haley, Co. M, Fourth New York Cavalry a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness shot through the lungs inevitably dying came over to this country from Ireland to enlist has not a single friend or acquaintance here is sleeping soundly at this moment, (but it is the sleep of death) has a bullet-hole straight through the lung I saw Tom when first brought here, three days since, and didn't supppose he could live twelve hours (yet he looks well enough in the face to a casual observer.) He lies there with his frame exposed above the waist, all naked, for cool ness, a fine built man, the tan not yet bleach'd from his cheeks and neck. It is useless to talk to him, as with his sad hurt, and the stimulants they give him, and the utter strangeness of every object, face, furniture, &c., the poor fellow, even when awake, is like a frighten'd, shy animal. Much of the time he sleeps, or half sleeps. (Sometimes I thought he knew more than be show'd.) I often come and sit by him in perfect silence ; he will breathe for ten min utes as softly and evenly as a young babe asleep. Poor youth, so handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, without the least start, awaken'd, open'd his DURING THE WAR. 17 eyes, gave me a long, long steady look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier one long, clear silent look a slight sigh then turn 'd back and went into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover'd near. W. H. E., Co. .F., Second N. J. His disease is pneumonia. He lay sick at the wretched hospital below Aquia Creek, for seven or eight days before brought here. He was de- tail'd from his regiment to go there and help as nurse ; but was soon taken down himself. Is an elderly, sallow-faced, rather gaunt, gray-hair'd man ; a widower,' with children. He express'd a great desire for good, strong, green tea. An excellent lady, Mrs. W., of Washington, soon sent him a package ; also a small sum of money. The doctor said give him the tea at pleasure ; it lay on the table by his side, and he used it every day. He slept a great deal ; could not talk much, as he grew deaf. Occupied bed 15, Ward I, Armory. (The same lady above, Mrs. W., sent the men a large pack age of tobacco.) J, G. lies in bed 52, Ward I ; is of Co. B, Seventh Penn sylvania. I gave him a small sum of money, some tobacco and envelopes. To a man adjoining, also gave 25 cents ; he flush'd in the face, when I offer'd it refused at first, but as I found he had not a cent, and was very fond of having the daily papers, to read, I prest it on him. He was evidently very grateful, but said little. J. T. L., of Co. F., Ninth New Hampshire, lies in bed 37, Ward I. Is very fond of tobacco. I furnish him some ; also with a little money. Has gangrene of the feet, a pret ty bad case ; will surely have to lose three toes. Is a regu lar specimen of an old-fashion'd, rude, hearty, New England country man, impressing me with his likeness to that cele brated singed cat, who was better than she look'd. Bed 3, Ward E, Armory, has a great hankering for pick les , something pungent . After consulting the doctor. I gave him a small bottle of horse-radish; also some apples ; also a book Some of the nurses are excellent. The woman nurse in this Ward I like very much. (Mrs. Wright a year afterwards I found her in Mansion House Hospital, Alexan- dri she is a perfect nurse.) In one bed a young man, Marcus Small, Co. K, Seventh Maine sick with dysentery and typhoid fever pretty criti cal, too I talk with him often he thinks he will die looks like it indeed. I write a letter for him home to East Liv- ermore, Maine I let him talk to me a little, but not much, advise him to keep very quiet do most of the talking my selfstay quite a while with him, as he holds on to my hand talk to him in a cheering, but slow, low, and meas ured manner talk about his furlough, and going home as soon as he is able to travel. 3 18 MEMORANDA Thomas Lindly, First Pennsylvania Cavalry, shot very badly through the foot poor young man, he suffers hor ribly, has to be constantly dosed with morphine, his face ashy and dazed, bright young eyes give him a large hand some apple, tell him to have it roasted in the mornir g, as he generally feels easier then, and can eat a little breakfast. I write two letters for him. Opposite, an eld Quaker lady is sitting by the side of her sen, Amer Moore, Second U. S. Artillery shot in the head two weeks since, very low, quite rational from hips down, paralyzed he will surely die. I speak a very few words to him every day and evening he answers pleasantly is a handsome fellow wants nothing (he told me soon after he came about his home affairs, his mother had been an in valid, and he fear'd to let her know his condition.) He died soon after she cime. (In my visits to the Hospitals I found it was in the simple matter of Personal Presence, and emanating ordinary cheer and magnetism, that I succeeded and help'd more than by medical nursing, or delicacies, or gifts of money, or anything else. During the war I possess'd the perfection of physical health. My habit, when practicable, was to prepare for starting out on one of those daily or nightly tours, of from a couple to four or five hours, by fortifying myself with pre vious rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good meal, and as cheer ful an appearance as possible.) June 25, (Thursday, Sundown}. As I sit writing this para graph I see a train of about thirty huge four-horse wagons, used as ambulances, fill'd with wounded, passing up Four teenth street, on their way, probably, to Columbian, Carver, and Mount Pleasant Hospitals. This is the way the men come in now, seldom in small numbers, but almost always in these long, sad processions. Through the past winter, while our army lay opposite Fredericksburgh, the like strings of ambulances were of frequent occurrence along Seventh street, passing slowly up from the steamboat wharf, with loads from Aquia Creek. Sad Wounds, the Young. The soldiers are nearly all young men, and far more American than is generally supposed I should say nine-tenths are native-born. Among the arri vals from Chancellorsville I find a large proportion of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois men. As usual, there are all sorts of wounds. Some of the men fearfully burnt from the explo sion of artillery caissons. One Ward has a long row of offi cers, some with ugly hurts. Yesterday was perhaps worse than usual. Amputations are going on the attendants are dressing wounds. As you pass by, you must be on your guard where you look. I saw the other day a gentleman, a visitor apparently from curiosity, in one of the Wards, step and turn a moment to look at an awful wound they were DURING THE WAR. 19 probing, &c. He turn'd pale, and in a moment more he had fainted away and fallen n the floor. June 29. Just before sundown this evening a very large cavalry force went by a fine sight. The men evidently had seen service. First came a mounted band of sixteen bugles, drums and cymbals, playing wild martial tunes made my heart jump. Then the principal officers, then company after company, with their officers at their heads, making of coarse the main part of the cavalcade ; then a long train f men with led horses, lots of mounted negroes with special horses and a long string of baggage- waggons, each drawn by four horses and then a motley rear guard. It was a pro nouncedly warlike and gay show. The sabres clank 'd, the men look'd young and healthy and strong ; the electric tramping of so many horses on the hard road, and the gal lant bearing, fine seat, and bright faced appearance of a thousand and more handsome young American men, were so good to see quite set me up for hours. An hour later another troop went by, smaller in numbers, perhaps three hundred men. They too look'd like servicea ble men, campaigners used to field and fight. July 3. This forenoon, for more than an hour, again long strings of cavalry, several regiments, very fine men and horses, four or five abreast. I saw them in Fourteenth street, coming in town from north. Several hundred extra horses, some of the mares with colts, trotting along. (Ap- pear'd to be a number of prisoners too.) How inspirit ing always the cavalry regiments ! Our men are generally well mounted, they ride well, feel good, are young, and gay on the saddle, their blankets in a roll behind them, their sabres clanking at their sides. This noise and movement and the tramp of many horses' hoofs has a curious effect upon one. The bugles play presently you hear them afar off, deaden'd, mix'd with other noises. Then just as they had all pass'd, a string of ambulances commenced from the other way, moving up Fourteenth street north, slowly wending along, bearing a large lot of wounded to the hospitals. 4ta July Battle of GETTYSBURG, The weather to-day, upon the whole, is very fine, warm, but from a smart rain last night, fresh enough, and no dust, which is a great relief for this city. I saw the parade about noon, Penn sylvania avenue, from Fifteenth street down toward the Capitol. There were three regiments of infantry, (I suppose the ones doing patrol duty here,) two or three societies of Odd Fellows, a lot of children in barouches, and a squad of policemen. (It was a useless imposition upon the soldiers they have work enough on their backs without piling the like of this.) As I went down the Avenue, saw a big flaring placard on 20 MEMORANDA the bulletin board of a newspaper office, announcing " Glori ous Victory for the Union Army!" Meade had fought Lee at Gettysburgh, Pennsylvania, yesterday and day 'before, and repuls'd him most signally, taken 3,000 prisoners, &c. (I afterwards saw Meade 's despatch, very modest, and a sort of order of the day from the President himself, quite reli gious, giving thanks to the Supreme, and calling on the peo ple to do the same, &c.) I walk'd on to Armory Hospital took along with me several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, good and strong, but innocent. Went through several of the Wards, announc'd to the soldiers the news from Meade, and gave them all a good drink of the syrups with ice water, quite re freshing Meanwhile the Washington bells are ringing their sundown peals for Fourth of July, and the usual fusil lades of boys' pistols, crackers, and guns. A Cavalry Gamp. I am writing this nearly sundown, watching a Cavalry company, (acting Signal Service,) just come in through a shower, and making their night's camp ready on some broad, vacant ground, a sort of hill, in full view, opposite my window. There are the men in their yel low-striped jackets. All are dismounted ; the freed horses stand with drooping heads and wet sides. They are to be led off presently in groups, to water. The little wall-tents and shelter-tents spring up quickly. I see the fires already blazing, and pots and kettles over them. The laggards among the men are driving in tent-poles, wielding their axes with strong, slow blows. I see great huddles of horses, bundles of hay, men, (some with unbuckled sabres yet on their sides,) a few officers, piles of wood, the flames of the fires, comrades by two and threes, saddles, harness, &c. The smoke streams upward, additional men arrive ana dis mount same drive in stakes, and tie their horses to them ; some go with buckets for water, some are chopping wood, and so on. July 6. A steady rain, dark and thick and warm. A train of six-mule wagons has just pass'd bearing pontoons, great square-end flat-boats, and the heavy planking for overlaying them. We hear that the Potomac above nere is flooded, and are wondering whether Lee will be able to get back across again, or whether Meade will indeed break him to pieces. The cavalry camp on the hill is a ceaseless field of observa tion for me. This forenoon there stand the horses, huddled, tether'd together, dripping, steaming, chewing their hay. The men emerge from their tents, drip ping also. The fires are half quench'd. July 10. Still the camp opposite perhaps 50 or 60 tents. Some of the men are cleaning their sabres, (pleasant to-day,) some brushing boots, some laying off, reading, writing some DURING THE WAR. 21 cooking, some sleeping On long temporary cross-sticks back of the tents are hung saddles and cavalry accoutrements blankets and overcoats are hung out to air there are the squads of horses tether'd, feeding, continually stamping and whisking their tails to keep off flies I sit long in my third story window and look at the scene a hundred little things going en or peculiar objects connected with the camp that could not be described, any one of them justly, without much minute drawing and coloring in words. A New York Soldier. This afternoon, July 22, I have spent a long time with Oscar F. Wilber, Company G, One Hundred and Fifty-fourth !N"ew York, low with chronic diar rhoea, and a bad wound also. He ask'd me to read to him a chapter in the New Testament. I complied, and ask'd him what I should read. He said : " Make your own choice." I ppen'd at the close of one of the first books of the Evangel ists, and read the chapters describing the latter hours of Christ, and the scenes at the crucifixion. The poor, wasted young man ask'd me to read the following chapter also, how Christ rose again.. I read very slowly, for Oscar was feeble. It pleas'd him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask'd me if I enjoy'd religion. I said: " Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, and yet, may-be, it is the same thing." He said : " It is my chief reliance." He talk'd of death, and said he did not fear it. I said : " Why, Oscar, don't you think you will get well ?" He said : " I may, but it is not probable." He spoke calmly of his condition. The wound was very bad ; it discharg'd much. Then the diar rhea had prostrated him, and I felt that he was even then the same as dying. He behaved very manly and affectionate. The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving he return'd four fold. He gave me his mother's address, Mrs. Sally B. "Wil ber, Alleghany Post-office, Cattaraugus County, N. Y. I had several such interviews with him. He died a few days after the one just described. Aug. 8. To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory Square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining Ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the Ward where the music was, I walk'd half way down and took a seat by the cot of a young Brooklyn friend, S. B., badly wounded in the hand at Chancellorsville, and who has suffer 'd much, but who at that moment in the evening was wide awake and comparatively easy. He had turn'd over on his left side to get a better view of the singers, but the plentiful drapery of the musquito curtains of the adjoining cots obstructed the sight. I stept round and loop'd them all up, so that he had a clear show, and then sat down attain by him, and look'd and listened. The principal singer was a young lady nurse of one of the Wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join 'd 22 MEMORANDA by the lady nurses of other Wards. They sat there, making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces ; ana standing up a little behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, &c., with books in their hands, taking 'part in the singing. Of course it was not such a performance as the great soloists at the Kew York Opera House take a hand in ; but I am not sure but I receiv'd as much pleasure, under the circumstances, sitting there, as I have had from the best Italian composi tions, express'd by world-famous performers The scene was, indeed, an impressive one. The men lying up and down the hospital, in their cots, (some badly wounded some never to rise thence,) the cots themselves, with their drapery of white curtains, and the shadows down the lower and upper parts of the Ward ; then the silence of the men, and the atti tudes they took the whole was a sight to look around upon again and again. And there, sweetly rose those female voices up to the high, whitewash'd wooden roof, and pleas antly the roof sent it all back again. They sang very well ; mostly quaint old songs and declamatory hymns, to fitting tunes. Here, for instance, is one of the songs they sang : SHINING SHORES. My days are swiftly gliding by. and I a Pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger ; For O we stand on Jordan's strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shores we may almost discover. We'll gird our loins my brethren dear, our distant home discerning, Our absent Lord has left us word, let every lamp be burning, For O we stand on Jordan's strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shores we may almost discover. As the strains reverberated through the great edifice of boards, (an excellent place for musical performers,) it was flain to see how it all sooth'd and was grateful to the men. saw one near me turn over, and bury his face partially in his pillow ; he was probably ashamed to be seen with wet eyes. Aug. 12. I see the President almost every day, as I hap pen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season, but has quarters at a healthy location, some three miles north of the city, the Soldiers' Home, a United States military establishment. I saw him this morning about 8 coming in to business, riding on Vermont avenue, near L street. The sight is a significant one, (and different enough from how and where I first saw him.*) He always has a * I shall not easily forget the first time I saw Abraham Lincoln. It must have been about the 18th or 19th of February, 1861. It was rather a pleasant spring afternoon, in New York city, as Lincoln arrived there from the West to stop a few hours and then pass on 'to Washington, to prepare for his inaugura tion. I saw him in Broadway, near the site of the present Post-office. He had come down, I think, from Canal street, to stop at the Astor House. The broad spaces, sidewalks, and street in the neighborhood, and for some distance, were DURING THE WAR. 23 company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry, with sabres drawn, and held upright ever their shoulders. The party makes n great show in uniforms or horses. Mr. Lincoln, on the saddle, generally rides a good-sized easy-going gray horse, is dress'd iD plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty ; wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man. A Lieutenant, with yellow straps, rides at his left, and following behind, two by two, come the cavalry men in their yellow-striped jackets. They are gen erally going at a slow trot, as that is the pace set them by the 'One they wait upon. The sabres and accoutrements clank, and the entirely unornamental cortege as it trots to wards Lafayette square, arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes. I see very plainly ABRA HAM LINCOLN'S dark brown face, with the deep cut lines, the eyes, &c., always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we always exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche. The cavalry always accompany him, with drawn sabres. Often I notice as he goes out evenings and some times in the morning, when he returns early he turns off and halts at the large and handsome residence of the Secre tary of War, on K street, and holds conference there. If in his barouche, I can see from my window he does not alight, but sits in the vehicle, and Mr. Stanton comes out to attend him. Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony. Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President crowded with solid masses of people, many thousands. The omnibuses and other vehicles had been all turn'd off, leaving an unusual hush in that busy part of the city. Presently two or three shabby hack barouches made their way with some difficulty through the crowd, and drew up at the Astor House entrance. A tall figure step'd out of the centre of these barouches, paus'd leisurely on the sidewalk, look'd up at the dark granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn'd round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds and so, with very moderate pace, and accompanied by a few unknown-looking persons, ascended the portico steps. The figure, the look, the gait, are distinctly impress'd upon me yet ; the unusual and uncouth height, the dress of complete black, the stovepipe hat push'd back on the head, the dark-brown complexion, the seam'd and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, the black, bushy head of hair, the disproportionately long neck, and the hands held behind as he stood observing the people. All was comparative and ominous silence. The new comer look'd with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return'd the look with similar curiosity. In both there was a dash of something almost comical. Yet there was much anxiety in certain quarters. Cautious persons had fear'd that there would be some outbreak, some mark'd indignity or insult to the Presi dent elect on his passage through the city, for he possess'd no personal popu larity in New York, and not much political. No such outbreak or insult, how ever, occurr'd. Only the silence of the crowd was very significant to those who were accustom'd to the usual demonstrations of New York in wild, tumultuous hurrahs the deafening tumults of welcome, and the thunder- shouts of pack'd myriads along the whole line of Broadway, receiving Hunga rian Kossuth or Filibuster Walker. 24 MEMORANDA and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the citj. Mrs. Lincoln was dress'd in complete black, with a long crape veil. The equipage is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They pass'd me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slow, and his look, though abstracted, happen'd to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow'd and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. Thereis something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed. Heated term. There has lately been much suffering here from heat. We have had it upon us now eleven days. I go around with an umbrella and a fan. I saw two cases of sun-stroke yesterday, one in Pennsylvania avenue, and an other in Seventh street. The City Railroad Company loses some horses every day. Yet Washington is having a livelier August, and is probably putting in a more energetic and satisfactory summer, than ever before during its existence. There is probably more human electricity, more population to make it, more business, more light-heartedness, than ever before. The armies that swiftly circumambiated from Fred- ericksburgh, march'd, struggled, fought, had out their mighty clinch and hurl at Gettysburgh, wheel'd, have circumambi ated again, return'd to their ways, touching us not, either at their going or coming. And Washington feels that she has pass'd the worst ; perhaps feels that she is henceforth mis tress. So here she sits with her surrounding hills and shores spotted with guns ; and is conscious of a character and iden tity different ~from what it was five or six short weeks ago, and very considerably pleasanter and prouder. Soldiers and Talks. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, you meet everywhere about the city, often superb looking men, though invalids dress'd in worn uniforms, and carrying canes or crutches. I often have talks with them, occasionally quite long and interesting. One, for instance, will have been all through the Peninsula under McClellan narrates to me the fights, the marches, the strange, quick changes of that eventful campaign, and gives glimpses of many things un told in any official reports or books or journals. These, in deed, are the things that are genuine and precious. The man was there, has been out two years, has been through a dozen fights, the superfluous flesh of talking is long work'd off him, and now he gives me little but the hard meat and sinew I find it refreshing, these hardy, bright, intuitive, American young men, (experienced soldiers with all their youth.) The vital play and significance moves one more than books. Then there hangs something majestic about a DURING THE WAR. 25 man who has borne his part in battles, especially if he is very quiet regarding it when you desire him to unbosom. I am continually lost at the absence of blowing and blowers among these old-young American militaires.' I have found some man or another who has been in every battle since the War began, and have talk'd-with them about each one, in every part of the United States, and many of the engage ments on the rivers and harbors too. I find men hereYrom every State in the Union, without exception. (There are more Southerners, especially Border State men, in the Union army than is generally supposed.) I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this War practically is, or what genuine America is, and her character, without some such experience as this I am having. Death of a Wisconsin Officer. Another characteristic scene of that dark and bloody 1863, from notes of my visit to Armory Square Hospital, one hot but pleasant summer day. In Ward H we approach the cot of a young Lieutenant of one f the Wisconsin regiments. Tread the bare board floor lightly here, for the pain and paniing of death are in this cot ! I saw the Lieutenant when he was first brought here from Chancellorsville, and have been with him occa sionally from day to day, and night to night. He had been getting" along pretty well, till night before last, when a sud den hemorrhage that could not be stopt came upon him, and to-day it still continues at intervals. Xotice that water-pail by the side of the bed, with a quantity of blood and bloody pieces of muslin nearly full ; that tells the story. The poor young man is lying panting, struggling painfully for breath, his great dark eyes with a glaze already upon them, and the choking faint but audible in his throat. An attendant sits by him, and will not leave him till the last; yet little r nothing can be done. He will die here in an hour or two without the presence of kith or kin. Meantime the ordinary chat and business of the Ward a little way off goes on in differently. Some of the inmates are laughing and joking, others are playing checkers or cards, others are reading, &c. (I have noticed through most of the hospitals that as long as there is any chance for a man, no matter how bad he may be, the surgeon and nurses work hard, sometimes with curi ous tenacity, for his life, doing everything, and keeping some body by him to execute the doctor's orders, and minister to him every minute night and day See that screen there. As you advance through the dusk of early candle-light, a nurse will step forth on tip-toe, and silently but imperiously forbid you to make any noise, or perhaps to come near at all. Some soldier's life is nickering there, suspended be tween recovery and death. Perhaps at this moment the ex hausted frame has just fallen into a light sleep that a step might shake. You must retire. The neighboring patients 26 MEMORANDA must move in their stocking feet. I have been several times struck with such mark'd efforts everything bent to save a life from the very grip of the destroyer. But when that grip is once firmly fix'd, leaving no hope or chance at all, the surgeon abandons the patient. If it is a case where stimulus is any relief, the nurse gives milk-punch or brandy, or whatever is wanted, ad libitum. There is no fuss made. Not a bit of sentimentalism or whining have I seen about a single death-bed in hospital or on the field, but generally impassive indifference. All is over, as far as any efforts can avail ; it is useless to expend emotions or labors. While there is a prospect they strive hard at least most surgeons do; but death certain and evident, they yield the field.) Aug., Sep., and Oct., ^?>The Hospitals. I am in the habit of going to all, and to Fairfax Seminary, Alexandria, and over Long Bridge to the great Convalescent Camp, &c. The journals publish a regular directory of them a long list. As a specimen of almost any one of "'.he larger of these Hos pitals, fancy to yourself a space of three to twenty acres of ground, on which are group'd ten or twelve very large wooden barracks, with, perhaps, a dozen or twenty, and sometimes more than that number, of small buildings, ca pable altogether of accommodating from five hundred to a thousand or fifteen hundred persons. Sometimes these wooden barracks or Wards, each of them, perhaps, from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet long, are ranged in a straight row, evenly fronting the street ; others are planned so as to ferm an immense V ; and others again are ranged around a hollow square. They make altogether a huge clus ter, with the additional tents, extra wards for contagious diseases, guard-houses, sutler's stores, chaplain's house, &c. In the middle will probably be an edifice devoted to the of fices of the Surgeon in Charge, and the Ward Surgeons, principal attaches, clerks, &c. Then around this centre radi ate or are gathered the Wards for the wounded and sick. The Wards are either letter'd alphabetically, Ward G, Ward K, or else numerically, 1,2,3, &c. Each has its Ward Sur geon and corps of nurses. Of course, there is, in the aggre gate, quite a muster of employes, and over all the Surgeon in Charge. The newspaper reader off through the agricultural regions, East or West, sees frequent allusions to these Hospitals, but has probably no clear idea of them. Here in Washing ton, when they are all fill'd, (as they have been already seyeral times,) they contain a population more numerous in itself than the whole of the Washington of ten or fifteen years ago. Within sight of the Capitol, as I write, are some fifty or sixty such collections or camps, at times holding from fifty to seventy thousand men. Looking from any emi nence and studying the topography in my rambles, I use DURING THE WAR. 27 them as landmarks. Through the rich August verdure of the trees see that white group of buildings off yonder in the outskirts ; then another cluster half a mile to the left of the first; then another a mile to the right, and another a mile beyond, and still another between us and the first. Indeed, we can hardly look in any direction but these grim clusters are dotting the beautiful landscape and environs. That lit tle town, as you might suppose it, off there on the brow of a hill, is indeed a town, but of wounds, sickness, and death. It is Finley Hospital, northeast of the city, on Kendall Green, as it used to be call'd. That other is (Campbell Hos pital. Both are large establishments. I have known these two alone to have from two thousand to twenty-five hundred inmates. Then there is Carver Hospital, larger still, a wall'd and military city regularly laid out, and guarded by squads of sentries. Again, offcast, Lincoln Hospital, a still larger one; and half a mile further Emory Hospital. Still sweeping the eye around down the river toward Alexandria, we see, to the right, the locality where the Convalescent Camp stands, with its five, eight, or sometimes ten thousand inmates. Even all these are but a portion. The Hare wood, Mount Pleasant, Armory Square, Judiciary Hospitals, are some of the rest, already mention'd, and all of them large collections. Oct. 20. To-night, after leaving the Hospital, at 10 o'cl'k, (I had been on self-imposed duty some five hours, pretty closely confined,) I wander'd a long time around Washing ton. The night was sweet, very clear, sufficiently cool, a voluptuous half-moon slightly golden, the space near it of a transparent tinge. I walk'd up Pennsylvania Avenue, and then to Seventh street, and a long while round the Patent Office. Somehow it look'd rebukefully strong, majestic, there in the delicate moonlight. The sky, the planets, the constellations all so bright, so calm, so expressively silent, so soothing, after those Hospital scenes. I wander'd to and i'ro till the moist moon set, long after midnight. Spiritual Characters Among the Soldiers. Every now and then in Hospital or Camp, there are beings I meet speci mens of unworldliness, disinterestedness and animal purity and heroism perhaps some unconscious Indianian, or from Ohio or Tennessee on whose birth the calmness of heaven seems to have descended, and whose gradual growing up, whatever the circumstances of work-life or change, or hard ship, or small or no education that attended it, the power of a strange, spiritual sweetness, fibre and inward health have also attended. Something veil'd and abstracted is often a part of the manners of these beings. I have met them, I say, not seldom in the Army, in Camp, and in the j^reat Hospitals. The Western regiments contain many of them. They are often young men, obeying the events and occa- 28 MEMORANDA sions about them, marching, soldiering, fighting, foraging, cooking, working on farms, or at some trade^before the war- unaware of their own nature, (as to that, who is aware of his own nature ?) their companions only understanding that they are diiferent from the rest, more silent, "something odd about them," and apt to g oft" and meditate and muse in solitude. Cattle Droves About Washington. Among other sights are immense droves of cattle, with their drivers, passing through the streets of the city. Some of the men have a way of leading the cattle on by a peculiar call, a wild, pensive hoot, quite musical, prolong'd, indescribable, sounding something between the coo of a pigeon and the hoot of an owl. 1 like to stand and look at the sight of one of these immense droves a little way off (as the dust is great.) There are always men on horseback, cracking their whips and shout ingthe cattle low some obstinate ox or steer attempts to escape then a lively scene the mounted men, always excel lent riders and on good horses, dash after the recusant, and wheel and turn A dozen mounted drovers, their irreat, slouch'd, broad-brim'd hats, very picturesque another dozen on foot everybody cover'd with dust long goads in their hands An immense drove of perhaps 2000 cattle the shouting, hooting, movement, &c, Hospital Perplexity. To add to other troubles, amid the confusion of this great army of sick, it is almost impossible for a stranger to find any friend or relative, unless he has the patient's address to start upon. Besides the directory printed in the newspapers here, there are one or two general directories of the Hospitals kept at Provost's headquarters, but they are nothing like complete ; they are never up to date, and, as things are, with the daily streams of coming and going and changing, cannot be. (I have known cases, for instance, such as a farmer coming here from jSTorthern ISTew York to find a wounded brother, faithfully hunting round for a week, and then compell'd to leave and go home without getting any trace of him. When he got nome he found a letter from the brother giving the right address in a hospital in Seventh street here.) CULPEPPER, YA., Feb., '64. Here I am, pretty well down toward the extreme front. Three or four days ago General S., who is now in chief command, (I believe Meade is ab sent sick,) moved a strong force southward from camp as if intending business. They went to the Rapidan ; there has since been some maneuvering and a little fighting, but noth ing of consequence. The telegraphic accounts given Mon day morning last, make entirely too much of it, I should say. What General S. intended we here know not, but we trust in that competent commander. We were somewhat ex cited, (but not so very much either,) on Sunday, during the day and night, as orders were sent out to pack up and har- DURING THE WAR. 29 ness, and be ready to evacuate, to fall back toward Wash ington. I was very sleepy, and went to bed. Some tremen dous shouts arousing me during the night, I went forth and found it was from the men above mention'd, who were re turning. I talked with some of the men. As usual I found them full of gayety, endurance, and many fine little out- shows, the signs of the most excellent good manliness of the world It was a curious sight to see those shadowy columns moving through the night. I stood unobserv'd in the dark ness and watch'd them long. The mud was very deep. The men had their usual burdens, overcoats, knapsacks, guns and blankets. Along and along they filed by me, with often a laugh, a song, a cheerful word, but never once a murmur. It may have been odd, but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American common people proper. It fell upon me like a great awe. The strong ranks moved neither fast nor slow. They had march'd seven or eight miles already through the slipping, unctious mud The brave First Corps stopt here. The equally braye Third Corps moved on to Brandy Station. The famous Brooklyn 14th are here, guarding the town. You see their red legs actively moving everywhere. Then they have a theatre of their own here. They give musical performances, nearly every thing done capitally. Of course the audience is a jam. It is real good sport to attend one of these entertainments of the 14th. I like to look around at the soldiers, and the general collection of eager and hand some young faces in front of the curtain, more than the scene on the stage. Paying the Bounties. One of the things to note here now is the arrival of the paymaster with his strong box, and the payment of bounties to veterans re-enlisting. Major H. is here to-day, with a small mountain of greenbacks, rejoicing the hearts of the 2d division of the 1st Corps. In the midst of a ricketty shanty, behind a little table, sit the Major and Clerk Eldridge, with the rolls before them , and much moneys. Ajre-enlisted man gets in cash about $200 down, (and heavy instalments following, as the pay-days arrive, one after an other. 1 The show of the men crowding around is quite ex hilarating. I like well to stand and look. They feel elated, their pockets full, and the ensuing furlough, the visit home. It is a scene of sparkling eyes and flush'd cheeks. The soldier has many gloomy and harsh experiences, and this makes up for some of them. Major H. is order'd to pay first all the re-enlisted men of the 1st Corps their bounties and back pay, and then the rest. You hear the peculiar sound of the rustling of the new and crisp greenbacks by the hour, through the nimble fingers of the Major and my friend Clerk E. Rumors, Changes, fyc. About the excitement of Sunday, 30 MEMORANDA and the orders to be ready to start, I have heard since that the said orders came from some cautious minor commander, and that the high principalities knew not and thought not of any such move ; which is likely. The rumor and fear here intimated a long circuit by Lee, and flank attack on our right. But I cast my eyes at the mud. which was then at its highest and palmiest condition, and retired composedly to rest. Still it is about time for Culpepper to have a change. Authorities have chased each other here like clouds in a stormy sky. Before the first Bull Run this was the rendez vous and camp of instruction of the Secession troops. I am stopping at the house of ,a lady who has witness'd all the eventful changes of the War, along this route of contending armies. She is a widow, with a family of young children, and lives here with her sister in a large handsome house. A number of army officers board with them. Virginia. Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with war as Virginia is, wherever I move across her surface, I find my self rous'd to surprise and admiration. What capacity for products, improvements, human life, Nourishment and ex pansion ! Everywhere that I have been in the Old Domin ion, (the subtle mockery of that title now !) such thoughts have fill'd me. The soil is yet far above the average of any of the northern States. And how full of breadth is the scenery, everywhere with distant mountains, everywhere convenient rivers. Even yet prodigal in forest woods, and surely eligible for all the fruits, orchards, and flowers. 'The skies and atmosphere most luscious, as I feel certain, from more than a year's residence in the State, and movements hither and yon. 1 should say very healthy, as a general thing. Then a rich and elastic quality, by night and by day. The sun rejoices in his strength, dazzling and burning, and yet, to me, never unpleasantly weakening. It is not the panting tropical heat, but invigorates. The north tempers it. The nights are often unsurpassable. Last evening (Feb. 8,) I saw the first of the new m