Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living-sweet are the musical voices sounding,

But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead with their silent eyes.

Perfume therefore my chant, O love, immortal love,

Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers,

Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride.

Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,

That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew.
For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.

I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers.

Ashes of Soldiers.

Each is not for its own sake,

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,

None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,

None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;

(Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,

Nor land nor man or woman without religion.)

My comrade!

For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.

Starting from Paumanok.

The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you need to accomplish it.

Produce great Persons, the rest follows.

He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original practical example.

To a Pupil.

By Blue Ontario's Shore.

AS AT THY PORTALS ALSO DEATH.

As at thy portals also death,

Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,

To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,

(I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,

I sit by the form in the coffin,

I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin ;)

To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best,

I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,

And set a tombstone here.

Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,

Whatever appears, whatever does not appear, we are beautiful or sinful in ourselves only.

A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow-but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline,

The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,

Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,

The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,

Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,

By the bivouac's fitful flame.

And over all the sky-the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking cut, the eternal stars. Bivouac on a Mountain Side.

RECONCILIATION.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again,

this soil'd world;

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin-I draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.