All is eligible to all, All is for individuals, all is for you, No condition is prohibited, not God's or any. All comes by the body, only health puts you rapport with the universe. Produce great Persons, the rest follows. 4 Piety and conformity to them that like, Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like, I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning every one I meet, Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense? (With pangs and cries as thine own O bearer of many children, These clamors wild to a race of pride I give.) O lands, would you be freer than all that has ever been before? you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen If to me. Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse, Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice, Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials, America brings builders, and brings its own styles. The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and pass'd to other spheres, A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done. America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all hazards, Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use of precedents, Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under their forms, Takes the lesson with calmness, perceivce the corpse slowly borne from the house, Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was fittest for its days, That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches, And that he shall be fittest for his days. Any period one nation must lead, One land must be the promise and reliance of the future. These States are the amplest poem, Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations, Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the day and night, Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars, Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves, Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the soul loves. 6 Land of lands and bards to corroborate ! Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face, To him the hereditary countenance bequeath'd both mother's and father's, His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees, Built of the common stock, having room for far and near, Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with incomparable love, Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits, Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him, Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him, Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia, Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him, If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he stretching with them North or South, Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between them, Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock, live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia, Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp, He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with northern transparent ice, Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie, Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the fishhawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle, His spirit surrounding his country's spirit, unclosed to good and evil, Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times, Surrounding just found shores, .slands, tribes of red aborigines, Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle, The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of the Constitution, The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants, The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable, The unsurvey'd interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals, hunters, trappers, Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the gestation of new States, Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming up from the uttermost parts, Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially the young men, Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors, The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and decision of their phrenology, The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when wrong'd, The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity, good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make, The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness, The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement of the population, The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-dig ging, Wharf-hemm'd cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points, 18 } Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast, Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life, On and on to the grapple with it Assassin then your life or ours be the stake, and respite no more. 7 (Lo, high toward heaven, this day, Libertad, from the conqueress' field return'd, I mark the new aureola around your head, No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce, And your port immovable where you stand, With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch'd and lifted fist, And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly crush'd beneath you, The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife, The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so To-day a carrion dead and damn'd, the despised of all the earth, 8 Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever keeps vista, Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you, O days of the future I believe in you—I isolate myself for your sake, O America because you build for mankind I build for you, O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision and science, Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future. (Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age! 9 I listened to the Phantom by Ontario's shore, By them all native and grand, by them alone can these States be fused into the compact organism of a Nation. To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account, That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle, as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants. Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest, Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. (Soul of love and tongue of fire ! Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world! Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?) ΙΟ Of these States the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns, Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad, He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less, He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key, He is the equalizer of his age and land, He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking, In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts, commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health, immortality, government, In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as good as the engineer's, he can make every word he speaks draw blood, The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith, He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,) He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing, As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things, |