4.

Hence I sign this salute over the sea,

And I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism, But remember the little voice that I heard wailing-and wait with perfect trust, no matter how long; And from to-day, sad and cogent, I maintain the bequeathed cause, as for all lands,

And I send these words to Paris with my love,

And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them,

For I guess there is latent music yet in France-floods of it.

Oh I hear already the bustle of instruments-they will soon be drowning all that would interrupt them; Oh I think the east wind brings a triumphal and free march,

It reaches hither-it swells me to joyful madness,--
I will run transpose it in words, to justify it,
I will yet sing a song for you, ma femme!

TO YOU.

WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,

I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;

Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true Soul and Body appear before me,

They stand forth out of affairs-out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, farms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,

I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

Oh I have been dilatory and dumb;

I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabbed nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you-you have not done justice to yourself;

None but have found you imperfect- I only find no imperfection in you;

None but would subordinate you-I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you;

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all,

From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured light;

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light;

From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing for ever.

Oh I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you You have not known what you are-you have slumbered upon yourself all your life;

Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the

time;

What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?

The mockeries are not you;

Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you;
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the

accustomed routine, if these conceal you from
others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you
from me;

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me; The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;

There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you;

No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in

you;

No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you;

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;

These immense meadows-these interminable riversyou are immense and interminable as they ; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution-you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,

Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles you find an unfailing sufficiency;

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

YEARS OF THE MODERN.

YEARS of the modern! years of the unperformed! Your horizon rises-I see it parting away for more august dramas;

I see not America only-I see not only Liberty's nation, but other nations preparing;

I see tremendous entrances and exits—I see new combinations-I see the solidarity 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 armed, 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;

-What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?

I see men marching and countermarching by swift mil

lions;

I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies

broken;

I see the landmarks of European kings removed; I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way ;)

-Never were such sharp questions asked as this day; Never 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 steam-ship, 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?

T

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 performed America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,

The unperformed, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.

TO THINK OF TIME.

I.

To think of time-of all that retrospection!

To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!

Have you guessed you yourself would not continue ? Have you dreaded these earth-beetles ?

Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing? If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing. To think that the sun rose in the east! that men and women were flexible, real, alive! that everything was alive!

To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part!

To think that we are now here, and bear our part!