I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,

To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,

To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,

Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,

Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade; Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

ment 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. (WHITMAN, in his Preface to the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 239, 240, and 277, 278.)

Compare also the passages from Whitman's Prose Works quoted or referred to in the note on 'When I heard the learn'd astronomer;' especially the passage in Specimen Days under date of July 22, 1878. Complete Prose Works, pp. 111, 112.

Whitman was acquainted with Blanco White's famous sonnet on this same idea. Among his clippings he preserved a copy of it, on the margin of which he had written: What life hides too!' (Notes and Fragments, p. 104.)

O dear to me my birth-things

all moving

things and the trees where I was born the grains, plants, rivers, Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands or through swamps, Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine, O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their banks again, Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the Okeechobee, the hummock-land or through pleasant openings or dense forests,

cross

I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the blossoming titi; Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast up the Carolinas,

I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine, the scented baytree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto,

I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet, and dart my vision inland;

O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp !

1 In the 1860 edition, with the title 'Longings for Home.'

The cactus guarded with thorns, the laureltree with large white flowers,

The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss,

The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;) O the strange fascination of these halfknown half-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the nightowl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake,

The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon, singing through the moon-lit night,

The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;

A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav❜d corn, slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful ears each well-sheath'd in its husk; O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, can stand them not, I will depart; O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!

I

O longings irrepressible ! O I will go back to old Tennessee and never wander more. 1860.

MANNAHATTA2

I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city,

Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal

name.

2 Compare Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,'' A Broadway Pageant,Give me the Splendid Silent Sun,' and the following passages from Whitman's Specimen Days: —

June 25. Returned to New York last night. Out today on the waters for a sail in the wide bay, southeast of Staten island, -a rough, tossing ride, and a free sight the long stretch of Sandy Hook, the highlands of Navesink, and the many vessels outward and inward bound. We came up through the midst of all, in the full sun. I especially enjoy'd the last hour or two. A moderate sea-breeze had set in; yet over the city, and the waters adjacent, was a thin haze, concealing nothing only adding to the beauty. From my point of view, as I write amid the soft breeze, with a sea-temperature, surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show. To the left the North river with its far vistanearer, three or four war-ships, anchor'd peacefullythe Jersey side, the banks of Weehawken, the Palisades, and the gradually receding blue, lost in the distanceto the right the East river-the mast-hemm'd shores

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,

I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,

-the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below (the tide is just changing to its ebb)—the broad water-spread everywhere crowded - no, not crowded, but thick as stars in the sky-with all sorts and sizes of sail and steam vessels, plying ferry-boats, arriving and departing coasters, great ocean Dons, iron-black, modern, magnificent in size and power, fill'd with their incalculable value of human life and precious merchandise -- with here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds (I wonder if shore or sea elsewhere can outvie them), ever with their slanting spars, and fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion-first-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm'd, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices group'd at the centre-the green of the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven above, and June haze on the surface below.

HUMAN AND HEROIC NEW YORK. The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn (will not the time hasten when the two shall be municipally united in one, and named Manhattan?) - what I may call the human interior and exterior of these great seething oceanic populations, as I get it in this visit, is to me best of all. After an absence of many years (I went away at the outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay since), again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets, I knew so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic Bowery human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day - in the places of amusement at night - bubbling and whirling and moving like its own environment of waters endless humanity in all phases - Brooklyn also — taken in for the last three weeks. No need to specify minutely -enough to say that (making all allowances for the shadows and side-streaks of a million-headed-city) the brief total of the impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me comforting, even heroic, beyond statement. Alertness, generally fine physique, clear eyes that look straight at you, a singular combination of reticence and self-possession, with good nature and friendliness-a prevailing range of according manners, taste and intellect, surely beyond any elsewhere upon earth and a palpable out-cropping of that personal comradeship I look forward to as the subtlest, strongest future hold of this many-item'd Union - are not only constantly visible here in these mighty channels of men, but they form the rule and average. Today, I should say defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions - an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours- fully aware of all that can be said on the other side -I find in this

Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,

Rich, hemm'd thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,

Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,

Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,

The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,

The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model'd,

The down-town streets, the jobbers' houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the river-streets,

Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thou sand in a week,

The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,

The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,

The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide, The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,

Trottoirs throng'd, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows, A million people

manners free and superb open voices-hospitality - the most courageous and friendly young men, City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!

City nested in bays! my city!

1860.

visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken-the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords - namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city city of superb democracy, amid su perb surroundings. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 109-111.)

See also Specimen Days, May 24, 1879, Two City Areas, Certain Hours,' Prose Works, pp. 126, 127; May 16 to 22, Central Park Walks and Talks,' Prose Works, pp. 128, 129; July 29, 1881, My Passion for Ferries,' Broadway Sights, Omnibus Jaunts,' Prose Works, pp. 11-13; and also the Collect, Prose Works, pp. 205, 206, quoted in part in the note on Give me the splendid silent sun,' p. 578.

10

When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements, When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the proud roar I love, When the round-mouth'd guns out of the smoke and smell I love spit their salutes, When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me, and heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin haze,

When gorgeous the countless straight stems, the forests at the wharves, thicken with colors,

When every ship richly drest carries her flag at the peak,

When pennants trail and street-festoons hang from the windows,

When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and foot-standers, when the mass is densest,

When the façades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time, When the guests from the islands advance,

when the pageant moves forward visible, When the summons is made, when the answer that waited thousands of years answers,

I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the crowd, and gaze with them.

2

Superb-faced Manhattan !

20

See my

cantabile! these and more are flashing to us from the procession,

As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine it moves changing before us.

For not the envoys nor the tann'd Japanee from his island only,2

Lithe and silent the Hindoo appears, the Asiatic continent itself appears, the past, the dead,

The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable,

The envelop'd mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,

The north, the sweltering south, eastern Assyria, the Hebrews, the ancient of ancients,

Vast desolated cities, the gliding present, all of these and more are in the pageantprocession.

Geography, the world, is in it,

40

The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond,

The coast you henceforth are facingyou Libertad! from your Western golden shores,

The countries there with their populations, the millions en-masse are curiously here,

The swarming market-places, the temples with idols ranged along the sides or at the end, bonze, brahmin, and llama,

fisherman,

The singing-girl and the dancing-girl, the ecstatic persons, the secluded emperors, Confucius himself, the great poets and

heroes, the warriors, the castes, all,3 Trooping up, crowding from all directions, from the Altay mountains,

From Thibet, from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China,

50

From the southern peninsulas and the demicontinental islands, from Malaysia, These and whatever belongs to them palpable show forth to me, and are seiz'd by me,

2 In the original edition this line reads: —

Not the errand-bearing princes only, nor the tann'd Japanee only.

3 In the original edition these two lines read: -The singing-girl and the dancing-girl-the ecstatic person -the divine Buddha;

The secluded Emperors - Confucius himself the great poets and heroes the warriors, the castes, all.