Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,

The institution of the dear love of comrades.

1860.

THE PRAIRIE-GRASS DIVIDING

THE prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing,

I demand of it the spiritual corresponding, Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,

Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,

Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,

Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and command, leading not following,

Those with a never-quell'd audacity, those with sweet and lusty flesh clear of taint, Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors, as to say Who are you?

Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd, never obedient, Those of inland America.1

1860.

1 If you care to have a word from me, I should speak it about these very prairies; they impress me most, of all the objective shows I have seen on this, my first real visit to the West. . . . As I have. launch'd my view across broad expanses of living green, in every direction I have again been most impress'd, I say, and shall remain for the rest of my life most impress'd, with... that vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in these prairies, combining the real and the ideal, and beautiful as dreams.

I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know how much of first-class art they have in these prairies- -how original and all your ownhow much of the influences of a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic, and new? how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the soul?

Then is it not subtly they who have given us our leading modern Americans, Lincoln and Grant ? — vastspread, average men - their foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet (to those who have eyes to see) with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering high as any. And do we not see, in them, foreshadowings of the future races that shall fill these prairies?

Not but what the Yankee and Atlantic State, and every other part- Texas, and the States flanking the south-east and the Gulf of Mexico- the Pacific shore empire - the Territories and Lakes, and the Canada line (the day is not yet, but it will come, including Canada entire) - are equally and integrally and indis

WHEN I PERUSE THE CONQUER'D FAME

WHEN I peruse the conquer'd fame of heroes and the victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the generals,

Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house,

But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them,

How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,

Then I am pensive-I hastily walk away fill'd with the bitterest envy.

1860.

I DREAM'D IN A DREAM 2

I DREAM'D in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,

I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,

solubly this Nation, the sine qua non of the human, political and commercial New World. But this favor'd central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America's distinctive ideas and distinctive realities. (WHITMAN, Specimen Days, 'The Prairies.' Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 134, 135.)

2 Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man- - which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States, will then [when the true poet comes] be fully express'd. A strong fibred joyousness and faith, and the sense of health al fresco, may well enter into the preparation of future noble American authorship..

It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown -- not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.

In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted develop.

ment of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west-it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future (I cannot too often repeat), are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal'd into a living union. (WHITMAN, in his Preface to the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 239, 240, and 277, 278.)

O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening perfumed South! my South!

O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!

O dear to me my birth-things

all moving

things and the trees where I was born -the grains, plants, rivers, Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands or through swamps, Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine, O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their banks again, Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the Okeechobee, Î cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings or dense forests,

I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the blossoming titi; Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast up the Carolinas,

I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine, the scented baytree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto,

I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet, and dart my vision inland;

O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp !

1 In the 1860 edition, with the title 'Longings for Home.'

The cactus guarded with thorns, the laureltree with large white flowers,

The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss,

The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;) O the strange fascination of these halfknown half-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the nightowl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake,

The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon, singing through the moon-lit night,

The humming-bird, the wild turkey, toe raccoon, the opossum;

A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav❜d corn, slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful ears each well-sheath'd in its husk;

O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart; O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!

O longings irrepressible ! O I will go back to old Tennessee and never wander more.

MANNAHATTA 2

1860.

I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city,

Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal

name.

Compare Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' 'A Broadway Pageant, Give me the Splendid Silent Sun,' and the following passages from Whitman's Specimen Days: June 25. Returned to New York last night. Out today on the waters for a sail in the wide bay, southeast of Staten island, a rough, tossing ride, and a free sight the long stretch of Sandy Hook, the highlands of Navesink, and the many vessels outward and inward bound. We came up through the midst of all, in the full sun. I especially enjoy'd the last hour or two. A moderate sea-breeze had set in; yet over the city, and the waters adjacent, was a thin haze, concealing nothing only adding to the beauty. From my point of view, as I write amid the soft breeze, with a sea-temperature, surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show. To the left the North river with its far vistanearer, three or four war-ships, anchor'd peacefullythe Jersey side, the banks of Weehawken, the Palisades, and the gradually receding blue, lost in the distance to the right the East river-the mast-hemm'd shores

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,

I see. that the word of my city is that word from of old,

-the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below (the tide is just changing to its ebb)-the broad water-spread everywhere crowded-no, not crowded, but thick as stars in the sky-with all sorts and sizes of sail and steam vessels, plying ferry-boats, arriving and departing coasters, great ocean Dons, iron-black, modern, magnificent in size and power, fill'd with their incalculable value of human life and precious merchandise — with here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds (I wonder if shore or sea elsewhere can outvie them), ever with their slanting spars, and fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion-first-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm'd, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices group'd at the centre-the green of the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven above, and June haze on the surface below. HUMAN AND HEROIC NEW YORK. The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn (will not the time hasten when the two shall be municipally united in one, and named Manhattan?) — what I may call the human interior and exterior of these great seething oceanic populations, as I get it in this visit, is to me best of all. After an absence of many years (I went away at the outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay since), again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets, I knew so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic Bowery human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day - in the places of amusement at night - bubbling and whirling and moving like its own environment of watersendless humanity in all phases Brooklyn also in for the last three weeks. No need to specify minutely -enough to say that (making all allowances for the shadows and side-streaks of a million-headed-city) the brief total of the impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me comforting, even heroic, beyond statement. Alertness, generally fine physique, clear eyes that look straight at you, a singular combination of reticence and self-possession, with good nature and friendliness-a prevailing range of according manners, taste and intellect, surely beyond any elsewhere upon earth and a palpable out-cropping of that personal comradeship I look forward to as the subtlest, strongest future hold of this many-item'd Union - are not only constantly visible here in these mighty channels of men, but they form the rule and average. day, I should say defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions - an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours-fully aware of all that can be said on the other side I find in this

taken

To

Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,

Rich, hemm'd thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded, Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,

Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,

The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,

The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model'd,

The down-town streets, the jobbers' houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the river-streets,

Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thou sand in a week,

The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,

The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,

The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide, The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,

Trottoirs throng'd, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows, A million people manners free and superb open voices-hospitality- the most courageous and friendly young men, City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!

City nested in bays! my city!

1860.

visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken -the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords - namely. Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city-city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings. (Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 109-111.),

See also Specimen Days, May 24, 1879, Two City Areas, Certain Hours,' Prose Works, pp. 126, 127; May 16 to 22, Central Park Walks and Talks,' Prose Works, pp. 128, 129; July 29, 1881, My Passion for Ferries,' Broadway Sights,' Omnibus Jaunts,' Prose Works, pp. 11-13; and also the Collect, Prose Works, pp. 26, 206, quoted in part in the note on Give me the splen did silent sun,' p. 578.