You on the Mississippi, and on all the branches and bayous of the Mississippi!

You friendly boatmen and mechanics! You roughs! You twain! And all processions moving along the streets!

I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.

38.

PRIMEVAL my love for the woman I love,

O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the thought of you!

Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,
The ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
I ascend-Í float in the regions of your love, O

SOMETIMES with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturned love;

But now I think there is no unreturned love-the pay is certain, one way or another,

Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe, or written one of my poems, if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love.

40.

THAT shadow, my likeness, that goes to and fro, seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering, How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,

How often I question and doubt whether that is really me;

But in these, and among my lovers, and carolling my

songs,

O I never doubt whether that is really me.

41.

1. AMONG the men and women, the multitude, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs, Acknowledging none else - not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am;

2. Lover and perfect equal!

I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections,

And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.

42.

To the young man, many things to absorb, to engraft, to develop, I teach, to help him become élève of mine,

But if blood like mine circle not his veins,

If he be not silently selected by lovers, and do not silently select lovers,

Of what use is it that he seek to become élève of mine?

43.

O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you,

As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,

Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

44.

HERE my last words, and the most baffling,

Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my stronges lasting,

Here I shade down and hide my thoughts - I do not expose them,

And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

45.

1. FULL of life, sweet-blooded, compact, visible,

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.

2. 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 lover;

Be it as if I were with you. Be not too certain but I am now with you.

CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY.

1. FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you, face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

2. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

3. The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-joined scheme-myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past, and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings-on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

4. Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small,
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross,
the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred
years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the floodtide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

5. It avails not, neither time or place― distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

I project myself also I return-I am with you, and know how it is.

- 6. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,

so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one

of a crowd,

Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river,
and the bright flow, I was refreshed,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with
the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships,
and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I
looked.

7. I too many and many a time crossed the river, the sun half an hour high,

I watched the Twelfth Month sea-gulls — I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,

I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,

I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

8. I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the

water,

Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of

beams,

Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sun-lit water,