incased in heavy armor seated on stately champing horses,

I hear the shouts, the sounds of blows and smiting steel;

I see the Crusaders' tumultuous armies hark, how the cymbals clang,

Swift to thy spell a shuddering hum like distant thunder rolls,

Lo, where the arm'd men hasten-lo, 'mid the clouds of dust the glint of bayonets, I see the grime-faced cannoneers, I mark the rosy flash amid the smoke, I hear the cracking of the guns;

Nor war alone - thy fearful music-song, wild player, brings every sight of fear, The deeds of ruthless brigands, rapine, murder - I hear the cries for help!

I see ships foundering at sea, I behold on deck and below deck the terrible tableaus.

Thou melt'st my heart, my brain - thou movest, drawest, changest them at will; And now thy sullen notes send darkness through me,

bearing the cross on high.

hope,

See the original Preface of this poem, in the Complete Prose Works, pp. 268-272. One of its chief ideas is condensed in two paragraphs near the end :

The Four Years' War is over- and in the peaceful, strong, exciting, fresh occasions of to-day, and of the future, that strange, sad war is hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of sentries, the prisons, the hospitals-(ah! the hospitals!) - all have passed away - all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and lusty generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of hatred, conflict, death. So let it be obliterated. I say the life of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all, south, north, east, west. To help put the United States (even if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a chant -to rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they are to play, and are even now playing - to the thought of their great future, and the attitude conform'd to it- - especially their great esthetic, moral, scientific future (of which their vulgar material and political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments by an orchestra), these, as hitherto, are still, for me, among my hopes, ambitions.

"Leaves of Grass," already publish'd, is, in its intentions, the song of a great composite democratic individual, male or female. And following on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my mind to run through the chants of this volume (if ever completed), the thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality.'

Compare also Whitman's Democratic Vistas, Complete Prose Works, pp. 197-250; "A Backward Glance

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Nor rhyme, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign court or indoor library; But an odor I'd bring as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of an Illinois prairie,

With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas uplands, or Florida's glades,

Or the Saguenay's black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron, With presentment of Yellowstone's scenes, or Yosemite,

And murmuring under, pervading all, I'd bring the rustling sea-sound,

That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world.

o'er Travel'd Roads;" and, especially, one of Whitman's early notes, in Notes and Fragments, p. 59: —

In Poems- bring in the idea of Mother- the idea of the mother with numerous children-all, great and small, old and young, equal in her eyes-as the identity of America.'

Like a limitless golden cloud filling the western sky,

Emblem of general maternity lifted above all,

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Sacred shape of the bearer of daughters and sons,

Out of thy teeming womb thy giant babes in ceaseless procession issuing, Acceding from such gestation, taking and giving continual strength and life, World of the real-world of the twain in one,

World of the soul, born by the world of the real alone, led to identity, body, by it alone,

Yet in beginning only, incalculable masses of composite precious materials, By history's cycles forwarded, by every nation, language, hither sent, Ready, collected here, a freer, vast, electric world, to be constructed here (The true New World, the world of orbic science, morals, literatures to come), Thou wonder world yet undefined, unform'd, neither do I define thee, How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?

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I feel thy ominous greatness evil as well as good,

I watch thee advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past,

I see thy light lighting, and thy shadow
shadowing, as if the entire globe,
But I do not undertake to define thee,
hardly to comprehend thee,

I but thee name, thee prophesy, as now,
I merely thee ejaculate !

Thee in thy larger, saner brood of female, male thee in thy athletes, moral, spiritual, South, North, West, East, (To thy immortal breasts, Mother of All, thy every daughter, son, endear'd alike, forever equal,)

Thee in thy own musicians, singers, artists, unborn yet, but certain,

Thee in thy moral wealth and civilization, (until which thy proudest material civilization must remain in vain,)

Thee in thy all-supplying, all-enclosing worship - thee in no single bible, saviour, merely,

Thy saviours countless, latent within thyself, thy bibles incessant within thyself, equal to any, divine as any.

(Thy soaring course thee formulating, not in thy two great wars, nor in thy century's visible growth,

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But far more in these leaves and chants, thy chants, great Mother!) 1

Thee in an education grown of thee, in

teachers, studies, students, born of thee, Thee in thy democratic fêtes en-masse, thy high original festivals, operas, lecturers, preachers,

Thee in thy ultimata (the preparations only now completed, the edifice on sure foundations tied),

Thee in thy pinnacles, intellect, thought, thy topmost rational joys, thy love and godlike aspiration,

In thy resplendent coming literati, thy fulllung'd orators, thy sacerdotal bards, kos

Not for success alone,

Not to fair-sail unintermitted always, The storm shall dash thy face, the murk of war and worse than war shall cover thee all over,

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(Wert capable of war, its tug and trials? be capable of peace, its trials, For the tug and mortal strain of nations

come at last in prosperous peace, not war ;) In many a smiling mask death shall approach beguiling thee, thou in disease shalt swelter,

The livid cancer spread its hideous claws, clinging upon thy breasts, seeking to strike thee deep within,

Consumption of the worst, moral consumption, shall rouge thy face with hectic,1 But thou shalt face thy fortunes, thy diseases, and surmount them all, Whatever they are to-day and whatever through time they may be, They each and all shall lift and pass away and cease from thee,

While thou, Time's spirals rounding, out of thyself, thyself still extricating, fusing, Equable, natural, mystical Union thou (the mortal with immortal blent), Shalt soar toward the fulfilment of the future, the spirit of the body and the mind, The soul, its destinies.

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The soul, its destinies, the real real, (Purport of all these apparitions of the real ;)

In thee America, the soul, its destinies,

1 Compare Democratic Vistas, pp. 203-208; and Two Rivulets, 1876, the prose section

Thou knowest my years entire, my life, My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely;

2 It was near the close of his indomitable and pious life on his last voyage when nearly 70 years of agethat Columbus, to save his two remaining ships from foundering in the Caribbean Sea in a terrible storm, had to run them ashore on the Island of Jamaica— where, laid up for a long and miserable year - 1503he was taken very sick, had several relapses, his men revolted, and death seem'd daily imminent; though he was eventually rescued, and sent home to Spain to die, unrecognized, neglected and in want. . . . It is only ask'd, as preparation and atmosphere for the following lines, that the bare authentic facts be recall'd and realized, and nothing contributed by the fancy. See, the Antillean Island, with its florid skies and rich foliage and scenery, the waves beating the solitary sands, and the hulls of the ships in the distance. See, the figure of the great Admiral, walking the beach, as a stage, in this sublimest tragedy for what tragedy, what poem, so piteous and majestic as the real scene?- and hear him uttering- -as his mystical and religious soul surely utter'd, the ideas following-perhaps, in their equiv alents, the very words. (WHITMAN.)