For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee, With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,

By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,

By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

Fierce-throated beauty!

Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all, Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,

(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)

THEE for my recitative,

the

Thee in the driving storm even as now, snow, the winter-day declining, Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance, Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front,

Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,

The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,

Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,

Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily

following,

Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering; Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent,

1 Contrast Wordsworth's attitude toward the railroad and its invasion of natural scenes! And compare Whitman's Specimen Days, April 29, 1879:

It was a happy thought to build the Hudson River railroad right along the shore. . . . I see, hear, the locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly, away off there, night and day-less than a mile distant, and in full view by day. I like both sight and sound. Express trains thunder and lighten along; of freight trains, most of them very long, there cannot be less than a hundred a day. At night far down you see the headlight approaching, coming steadily on like a meteor. The river at night has its special character-beauties.' 1876, vol. i, p. 369.

return'd,

Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the

lakes,

WHAT BEST I SEE IN THEE1

TO U. S. G. RETURN'D FROM HIS WORLD'S

TOUR

WHAT best I see in thee,

Is not that where thou mov'st down history's

great highways,

Ever undimm'd by time shoots warlike victory's dazzle,

Or that thou sat'st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace,

Or thou the man whom feudal Europe fêted, venerable Asia swarm'd upon,

Who walk'd with kings with even pace the round world's promenade;

But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,

Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,

Ohio's, Indiana's millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front, Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world's promenade, Were all so justified.

1881.

-com

1 So General Grant, after circumambiating the world, has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration - his lifeof the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering what the people can see in Grant' to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities (history has presented none more trying, no born monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy), may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself with credit year after year mand over a million armed men- fight more than fifty pitch'd battles-rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined- and then, retiring, quietly (with a cigar in his mouth), make the promenade of the whole world, through its courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people like - and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man-no art, no poetry-only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to do, what devolv'd upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secessionPresident following (a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself)-nothing heroic, as the authorities put it-and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him. (Specimen Days, September 27, 1879. Complete Prose Works, pp. 146, 147.) See also Whitman's poem: On the Death of General Grant.'

2 Compare Whitman's entry in his journal during his trip through Colorado:

'I have found the law of my own poems,' was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature-the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles- the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness- the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high-at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. (In Nature's grandest shows,' says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.')

We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly-mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us-every rood a new view flashing and each flash defying description on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass-but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen-all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can. (Specimen Days. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., p. 136.)

1 Compare the passages in Whitman's Prose Works referred to in the notes on pp. 564 and 579.

2 July 25, '81. Far Rockaway, L. I. A good day here, on a jaunt, amid the sand and salt, a steady breeze setting in from the sea, the sun shining, the sedge-odor, the noise of the surf, a mixture of hissing and booming, the milk-white crests curling over. had a leisurely bath and naked ramble as of old, on the warm-gray shore-sands, my companions off in a boat in deeper water-(I shouting to them Jupiter's menaces against the gods, from Pope's Homer.) (Specimen Days. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 176, 177.)

Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness; Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears a lack from all eternity in thy content,

(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee greatest-no less could make thee,)

Thy lonely state-something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet never gain'st, Surely some right withheld some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedomlover pent,

Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those breakers,

By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath,

And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and

[More than eighty-three degrees north-about a good day's steaming distance to the Pole by one of our fast oceaners in clear water-Greely the explorer heard the song of a single snow-bird merrily sounding over the desolation.]

OF that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank,

I'll mind the lesson, solitary bird - let me too welcome chilling drifts,

E'en the profoundest chill, as now-a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv'd,

Old age land-lock'd within its winter bay (cold, cold, O cold !)

These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet,

For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last;

Not summer's zones alone-not chants of youth, or south's warm tides alone,

THE VOICE OF THE RAIN

AND who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,

Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer,

as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,

Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed, and yet the same,

1 Compare, in Complete Prose Works, p. 190, the letter of May 31, 1882: From to-day I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain'd, with varying course -seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day-now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles-live largely in the open air-am sunburnt and stout (weigh 190),keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day. About two thirds of the time I am quite comfortable. What mentality I ever had remains entirely unaffected; though physically I am a half-paralytic, and likely to be so, long as I live. But the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish'd-I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives-and of enemies I really make no account.'

1888.

THANKS in old age thanks ere I go, For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air for life, mere life,

For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear-you, father you, brothers, sisters, friends,) For all my days - not those of peace alone -the days of war the same,

For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,

For shelter, wine and meat- for sweet appreciation,

(You distant, dim unknown-or young or old countless, unspecified, readers belov'd,

We never met, and ne'er shall meet-and yet our souls embrace, long, close and long;)

For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books for colors, forms, For all the brave strong men-devoted, hardy men who've forward sprung in freedom's help, all years, all lands,

(a special laurel ere I go, to life's war's chosen ones,

The cannoneers of song and thought— the great artillerists- the foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)

As soldier from an ended war return'dAs traveler out of myriads, to the long procession retrospective,

Thanks - joyful thanks!- a soldier's, traveler's thanks.

(Our joys of strife and derring-do to the last!)

Put on the old ship all her power to-day! Crowd top-sail, top-gallant and royal studding-sails,

Out challenge and defiance-flags and flaunting pennants added,