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Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape,

people, animals,

The profound earth and its attributes and the unquiet ocean, (so tell I my morning's romanza,)

All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy,

The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably

reaps,

The noblest and costliest cities, others grading and building and he domiciles there,

Nothing for any one but what is for him, near and far are for him, the ships in the offing,

The perpetual shows and marches on land are for him if they are for anybody.

He puts things in their attitudes,

He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love,

He places his own times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest never shame them afterward, nor assume to command them.

He is the Answerer,

What can be answer'd he answers, and what cannot be answer'd he shows how it cannot be answer'd.

A man is a summons and challenge,

(It is vain to skulk-do you hear that mocking and laughter? do you hear the ironical echoes?)

Books, friendships, philosophers, priests, action, pleasure, pride, beat up and down seeking to give satisfaction,

He indicates the satisfaction, and indicates them that beat up and down also.

Whichever the sex, whatever the season or place, he may go freshly and gently and safely by day or by night,

He has the pass-key of hearts, to him the response of the prying of hands on the knobs.

His welcome is universal, the flow of beauty is not more welcome or universal than he is,

The person he favors by day or sleeps with at night is blessed.

Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,

He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man translates himself also, One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees how they join.

He says indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President at his levee,

And he says Good-day my brother, to Cudge that hoes in the sugar-field,

And both understand him and know that his speech is right.

He walks with perfect ease in the capitol,

He walks among the Congress, and one Representative says to another, Here is our equal appearing and new.

Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic,

And the soldiers suppose him to be a soldier, and the sailors that he has follow'd the sea,

And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an

artist,

And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them, No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has

follow'd it,

No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and sisters there.

The English believe he comes of their English stock,

A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near, removed from none.

Whoever he looks at in the traveler's coffee-house claims him, The Italian or Frenchman is sure, the German is sure, the Spaniard is sure, and the island Cuban is sure,

The engineer, the deck-hand on the great lakes, or on the Mississippi or St. Lawrence or Sacramento, or Hudson or Paumanok sound, claims him.

The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood, The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see themselves in the ways of him, he strangely transmutes them, They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown.

The indications and tally of time,

Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs,

Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts,

What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their words,

The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark, but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark,

The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,

His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human

race.

The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets,

The singers are welcom'd, understood, appear often enough, but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the Answerer,

(Not every century nor every five centuries has contain'd such a day, for all its names.)

The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible names, but the name of each of them is one of the singers, The name of each is, eye-singer, ear-singer, head-singer, sweetsinger, night-singer, parlor-singer, love-singer, weird-singer, or something else.

All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems,
The words of true poems do not merely please,

The true poets are not followers of beauty but the august masters

of beauty;

The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers and fathers,

The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health, rudeness of body, withdrawnness,

Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems.

The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer, The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all these underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer.

The words of the true poems give you more than poems, They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else,

They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,

They do not seek beauty, they are sought,

Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.

They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the

outset,

They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full, Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.

A

OUR OLD FEUILLAGE.

LWAYS our old feuillage!

Always Florida's green peninsula - always the priceless. delta of Louisiana — always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas,

Always California's golden hills and hollows, and the silver mountains of New Mexico-always soft-breath'd Cuba,

Always the vast slope drain'd by the Southern sea, inseparable with the slopes drain'd by the Eastern and Western seas,

The area the eighty-third year of these States, the three and a half millions of square miles,

The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main, the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,

The seven millions of distinct families and the same number of dwellings always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches,

Always the free range and diversity-always the continent of Democracy;

Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers, Kanada, the snows;

Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge oval lakes ;

Always the West with strong native persons, the increasing density there, the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;

All sights, South, North, East-all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,

All characters, movements, growths, a few noticed, myriads unno

ticed,

Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering,

On interior rivers by night in the glare of pine knots, steamboats wooding up, Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware,

In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the hills, or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink,

In a lonesome inlet a sheldrake lost from the flock, sitting on the water rocking silently,

In farmers' barns oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done, they rest standing, they are too tired,

Afar on arctic ice the she-walrus lying drowsily while her cubs play around,

The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail'd, the farthest polar sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes,

White drift spooning ahead where the ship in the tempest dashes, On solid land what is done in cities as the bells strike midnight together,

In primitive woods the sounds there also sounding, the howl of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk,

In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead lake, in summer visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming, In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops,

Below, the red cedar festoon'd with tylandria, the pines and cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat,

Rude boats descending the big Pedee, climbing plants, parasites with color'd flowers and berries enveloping huge trees, The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the wind,

The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and the cooking and eating by whites and negroes, Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from troughs,

The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamoretrees, the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising;

Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North Carolina's coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work'd by horses, the clearing, curing, and packing-houses;

Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the incisions in the trees, there are the turpentine works,

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