The souls moving along... are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible?
And that my Soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful.
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?
Have you ever thought how much is in the negative quality of nature – the negative – the simply loafing, doing nothing, worrying about nothing, living out of doors and getting fresh air, plenty of sleep – letting everything else take care of itself?
After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights – not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite or anything else – is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.
We carry our fresh air with us, wherever we go. He who has it, has it anywhere – nothing can rob him of it. I find in all characters that live close to nature, capriciousness, variability – they seem to pattern after nature’s higher rules. The children are that way, and dogs, cats – not but that their perceptions, intuitions, are keen enough, but with the capricious, too.
No specification is necessary – to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever.
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.
I do not call one greater and one smaller, that which fills it period and place is equal to any.
I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing.
Not I, not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.
The present now and here, America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl, Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing, To-day’s eidolons.
But a cluster containing night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead.
Poetic style, when address’d to the Soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half- tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effects thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor.
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, None but has 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.
Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom’s athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success.
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself, An image, an eidolon.
I conn’d old times, I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in vast masses.