I have travel'd a long way merely to look on you to touch you,

For I could not die till I once look'd on you, For I fear'd I might afterward lose you.

Now we have met, we have look'd, we are safe,

Return in peace to the ocean my love, I too am part of that ocean my love, we are not so much separated,

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;

Be not impatient - a little space - know

you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,

Every day at sundown for your dear sake my love.

1865.

WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN'D ASTRONOMER1

WHEN I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

1 To-night, after leaving the hospital at 10 o'clock (I had been on self-imposed duty some five hours, pretty closely confined), I wander'd a long time around Washington. The night was sweet, very clear, sufficiently cool, a voluptuous half-moon, slightly golden, the space near it of a transparent blue-gray tinge. I walk'd up Pennsylvania avenue, and then to Seventh street, and a long while around 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 fro till the moist moon set, long after midnight. (Specimen Days, October 20, 1863. Complete Prose Works, p. 41.)

See also Specimen Days, July 22, 1878, Prose Works, pp. 111, 112; April 5, 1879, Prose Works, pp. 118-121; February 10, 1881, Prose Works, pp. 162, 163.

Compare one of Whitman's 'Notes on the Meaning and Intention of Leaves of Grass,' in Notes and Fragments, p. 58:

Book learning is good, let none dispense with it, but a man may [be] of great excellence and effect with very little of it. Washington had but little. Andrew Jackson also. Fulton also. Frequently it stands in the way of real manliness and power. Powerful persons and the first inventors and poets of the earth never come from the depths of the schools-never. There is a man who is no chemist, nor linguist, nor antiquary, nor mathematician-yet he takes very easily the perfection of these sciences, or of the belles lettres, and eats of the fruit of all. Erudition is low among the glories of humanity. I think if those who best embody it were collected together this day in the public assembly it would be grand. But powerful unlearned persons are also grand.

DID you ask dulcet rhymes from me? Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes?

But all book knowledge is important as helping one's personal qualities, and the use and power of a man. Let a man learn to run, leap, swim, wrestle, fight, to take good aim, to manage horses, to speak readily and clearly and without mannerism, to feel at home among common people and able to hold his own in terrible positions. With these

Behind Eluding - Mocking all the text-books and professor's expositions and proofs and diagrams and practical show, stand or lie millions of all the most beautiful and common facts. We are so proud of our learning! As if it were anything to analyze fluids and call certain parts oxygen or hydrogen, or to map out stars and call.

2 In the original version this poem reads:Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,

For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed most,
I bring:

A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,
And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;
The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything:
A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the
intellect;

But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm'd Libertad !
It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,
With joy with you, O soul of man.

3 Compare the opening stanzas of Emerson's 'Merlin.'

Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow ?

Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand - nor am I now (I have been born of the same as the war was born,

The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the martial dirge, With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral); What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works, And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes, For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me. 1

1865.

1 This is a poem which some of Whitman's admirers are fond of quoting to those who fail to appreciate him. It is hardly fair to him, however, to take it apart from his own more modest expression of the same ideas, in A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads: — '

And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do.

Plenty of songs had been sung — beautiful, matchless songs-adjusted to other lands than these - another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and to-day. Modern science and democracy seem'd to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements - which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means.

Behind all else that can be said, I consider "Leaves of Grass" and its theory experimental- -as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. (I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of any thing, or any results.)

'I have allow'd the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American individuality.... Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant "the great pride of man in himself," and permit it to be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. I think this pride indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.

'Let me not dare, here or anywhere, for my own purposes, or any purposes, to attempt the definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, in my opinion no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it. But it is not on "Leaves of Grass" distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance,

THICK-SPRINKLED bunting! flag of stars! Long yet your road, fateful flag - long yet your road, and lined with bloody death, For the prize I see at issue at last is the world,

All its ships and shores I see interwoven with your threads greedy banner; Dream'd again the flags of kings, highest borne, to flaunt unrival'd?

O hasten flag of man-O with sure and steady step, passing highest flags of kings,

Walk supreme to the heavens mighty symbol run up above them all,

Flag of stars! thick-sprinkled bunting!

1865.

or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism.'

2 In the original edition both the title and the first line read:

Flag of stars, thick-sprinkled bunting

5 But I with silent tread

Walk the spot my Captain lies. (1865.)

The most sonorous anthem ever chanted in the church of the world. (SWINBURNE.) See Swinburne's comparison of this poem with Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode,' in Under the Microscope.

-I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town.... I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones. . . . None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed. (WHITMAN, Specimen Days, August 12, 1863. Complete Prose Works, p. 37.)

I saw him on his return, at three o'clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look'd very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach'd to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native western form of manliness.) By his side sat his little boy, of ten years. There were no soldiers. (Specimen Days, March 4, 1865. Prose Works, p. 57.)

He leaves for America's history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence-he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality. Not but that he had faults, and show'd them in the Presidency; but honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop), UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form'd the hard-pan of his character. These he seal'd with his life. (Specimen Days, April 16, 1865. Prose Works, pp. 61, 62.)

See also in Whitman's Collect The Death of Abraham Lincoln.' Complete Prose Works, pp. 308, 309; and 'A Lincoln Reminiscence,' p. 331; also, in November Boughs, Abraham Lincoln,' Prose Works, pp. 436-438. It is not out of place to add here Lincoln's comment on Whitman. Seeing him walk by the White House, 'Mr. Lincoln' (says a witness of the scene, whose letter is quoted in Bucke's Life of Whitman, p. 42) ' asked

who that was, or something of the kind. I spoke up, mentioning the name Walt Whitman, and said he was the author of Leaves of Grass. Mr. Lincoln did not say anything, but took a good look, till Whitman was quite gone by. Then he said (I cannot give you his way of saying it, but it was quite emphatic and odd), "Well, he looks like a MAN." He said it pretty loud, but in a sort of absent way, and with the emphasis on the words I have underscored.' This was probably in the winter of 1864-1865.

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

With the pomp of the inloop'd flags with the cities draped in black,

With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil'd women standing, With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

With the countless torches lit, with the si

lent sea of faces and the unbared heads, With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,

With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and sol

Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,

With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,

With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,

In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,

With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows, And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,

And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.