AS I WALK THESE BROAD MAJESTIC DAYS. As I walk these broad majestic days of peace, (For the war, the struggle of blood finish'd, wherein, O terrific Ideal, Against vast odds erewhile having gloriously won, Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps in time toward denser wars, The approved growth of cities and the spread of inventions. I see the ships, (they will last a few years,) The vast factories with their foremen and workmen, And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object to it. But I too announce solid things, Science, ships, politics, cities, factories, are not nothing, Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring, triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight, They stand for realities all is as it should be. Then my realities; What else is so real as mine? Libertad and the divine average, freedom to every slave on the face of the earth, The rapt promises and luminè of seers, the spiritual world, these centuries-lasting songs, And our visions, the visions of poets, the most solid announcements of any. A CLEAR MIDNIGHT. THIS is thy hour O'Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars. SONGS OF PARTING. AS THE TIME DRAWS NIGH. As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud, A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me. I shall go forth, I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long, Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will suddenly cease. O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?—and yet it is enough, O soul; O soul, we have positively appear'd that is enough. YEARS OF THE MODERN. YEARS of the modern! years of the unperform'd! Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas, I see not America only, not only Liberty's nation but other nations preparing, I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the soli darity of races, I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's stage, (Have the old forces, the old wars, played their parts? are the acts suitable to them closed?) I see Freedom, completely arm'd and victorious and very haughty, with Law on one side and Peace on the other, A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste; see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way ;) Never were such sharp questions ask'd as this day, Tever was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God, Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest! His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes, With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war, With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all geography, all lands ; What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas? Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe? Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim, The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war, No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights; Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms, Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me, This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams O years! Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake ;) The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me, The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me. ASHES OF SOLDIERS. ASHES of soldiers South or North, As I muse retrospective murmuring a chant in thought, And again the advance of the armies. Noiseless as mists and vapors, From their graves in the trenches ascending, From cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee, From every point of the compass out of the countless graves, In wafted clouds, in myriads large, or squads of twos or threes or single ones they come, And silently gather round me. Now sound no note O trumpeters, Not at the head of my cavalry parading on spirited horses, With sabres drawn and glistening, and carbines by their thighs, (ah my brave horsemen ! My handsome tan-faced horsemen ! what life, what joy and pride, With all the perils were yours.) Nor you drummers, neither at reveillé at dawn, Nor the long roll alarming the camp, nor even the muffled beat for a burial, Nothing from you this time O drummers bearing my warlike drums. But aside from these and the marts of wealth and the crowded promenade, Admitting around me comrades close unseen by the rest and voiceless, The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive, I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers. Faces so pale with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet, Draw close, but speak not. Phantoms of countless lost, Invisible to the rest henceforth become my companions, Follow me ever desert me not while I live. 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. Dearest comrades, all is over and long gone, But love is not over and what love, O comrades! Perfume from battle-fields rising, up from the fœtor arising. Perfume therefore my chant, O love, immortal love, Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride. Make these ashes to nourish and blossom, O love, solve all, fructify all with the last chemistry. Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain, That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew, or the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North. THOUGHTS. I Of these years I sing, How they pass and have pass'd through convuls'd pains, as through parturitions, How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure fulfilment, the absolute success, despite of people illustrates evil as well as good, The vehement struggle so fierce for unity in one's-self; How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity, How few see the arrived models, the athletes, the Western States, or see freedom or spirituality, or hold any faith in results, (But I see the athletes, and I see the results of the war glorious and inevitable, and they again leading to other results.) How the great cities appear· how the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful, as I love them, How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and resounding, keep on and on, How society waits unform'd, and is for a while between things ended and things begun, How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of freedom and of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society, and of all that is begun, And how the States are complete in themselves—and how all triumphs and glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward, And how these of mine and of the States will in their turn be convuls'd, and serve other parturitions and transitions, And how all people, sights, combinations, the democratic masses too, serve - and how every fact, and war itself, with all its horrors, serves, And how now or at any time each serves the exquisite transition of death. 2 Of seeds dropping into the ground, of births, Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to impregnable and swarming places, Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, and the rest, are to be, (Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska,) |