THAT MUSIC ALWAYS ROUND ME.

THAT music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long untaught I did not hear,

But now the chorus I hear and am elated,

A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of daybreak I hear,

A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense

waves,

A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the

universe,

The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and violins, all these I fill myself with,

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings,

I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contend-
ing with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;
I do not think the performers know themselves — but now I think
I begin to know them.

WHAT SHIP PUZZLED AT SEA.

WHAT ship puzzled at sea, cons for the true reckoning?

Or coming in, to avoid the bars and follow the channel a perfect pilot needs?

Here, sailor! here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot, Whom, in a little boat, putting off and rowing, I hailing you offer.

A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER.

A NOISELESS patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you 0 my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

O LIVING ALWAYS, ALWAYS DYING.

O LIVING always, always dying!

O the burials of me past and present,

O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am

content ;)

O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at where I cast them,

To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.

TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE.

FROM all the rest I single out you, having a message for you, You are to die - let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate,

I am exact and merciless, but I love you there is no escape for

you.

Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you just feel it,

I do not argue, I bend my head close and half envelop it,

I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,

I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,

I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is eternal, you yourself will surely escape,

The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,

You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends, I am with you,

I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated, I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

NIGHT ON THE PRAIRIES.

NIGHT on the prairies,

The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;

I walk by myself—I stand and look at the stars, which I think now
I never realized before.

Now I absorb immortality and peace,

I admire death and test propositions.

How plenteous! how spiritual! how resumé !

The same old man and soul—the same old aspirations, and the

same content.

I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,

i

was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.

Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will measure myself by them,

And now touch'd with the lives of other globes arrived as far along as those of the earth,

Or waiting to arrive, or pass'd on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.

OI see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

THOUGHT.

As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing,

To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a wreck at sea,

Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and wafted kisses, and that is the last of them,

Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President, Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder'd off the Northeast coast and going down - of the steamship Arctic going down,

Of the veil'd tableau women gather'd together on deck, pale, heroic, waiting the moment that draws so close - the

moment !

A huge sob

a few bubbles

then the women gone,

the white foam spirting up-and

Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on-and I now

pondering, Are those women indeed gone?

Are souls drown'd and destroy'd so?

Is only matter triumphant?

THE LAST INVOCATION.

Ar the last, tenderly,

From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house,

From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well

As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing,

Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,
I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;

(Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)

PENSIVE AND FALTERING.

PENSIVE and faltering,

The words the Dead I write,

For living are the Dead,

(Haply the only living, only real,

And I the apparition, I the spectre.)

THOU MOTHER WITH THY EQUAL BROOD.

I

Mother with thy equal brood,

THOU Mother in of different States, yet one identity only,

A special song before I go I'd sing o'er all the rest,
For thee, the future.

I'd sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality,

I'd fashion thy ensemble including body and soul,

I'd show away ahead thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish'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.

As a strong bird on pinions free,

2

Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,
Such be the thought I'd think of thee America,
Such be the recitative I'd bring for thee.

The conceits of the poets of other lands I'd 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 as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of an Illinois prairie,

With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas uplands, or Florida's glades,

Or the Saguenay's black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron,

With presentment of Yellowstone's scenes, or Yosemite,

And murmuring under, pervading all, I'd bring the rustling sea

sound,

That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world.

And for thy subtler sense subtler refrains dread Mother,
Preludes of intellect tallying these and thee, mind-formulas fitted
for thee, 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 reality, lo, the immortal idea!