Give me the pay I have served for! Give me to speak beautiful words! take all the rest; I have loved the earth, sun, animals--I have despised riches, I have given alms to every one that asked, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labour to others, I have hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown, I have gone freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families, I have read these leaves to myself in the open air--I have tried them by trees, stars, rivers, I have dismissed whatever insulted my own Soul or defiled my body, I have claimed nothing to myself which I have not carefully claimed for others on the same terms, I have studied my land, its idioms and men, I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself, I reject none, I permit all, Whom I have staid with once I have found longing for me ever afterward.[223] The poet is that equable sane man, in whose vision alone all things find and are seen in their proper place, for he sees each _sub specie æternitatis_--in its eternal aspect. But while thus boldly declaring himself as the man that should come, he has of course no desire to stand alone, and attempts to outline the equipment necessary for future American poets. They must not only identify themselves in every possible way with America, they must be themselves creative and virile. Those who criticise, explain and adjudge, can only create a literary soil; they cannot produce the flower and fruit of poetry. Returning to his favourite adage that a man is as great as a nation, he asserts that the true poet is America; frankly reading himself as a whole, he will see the meanings of America. Is then America also a symbol? Assuredly. She is the Republic; she is the Kingdom of God; she is Blake's Jerusalem; but behold, she is already founded and four-square upon the solid earth. That he was open-eyed to the materialistic spirit rampant throughout the continent while he was writing, is clearly shown in the bitter mockery of "Respondez,"[224] a poem afterwards suppressed. It is a challenge to thought; an ironic assertion of things that are false and futile, and which yet parade as realities. Though suggestive it is obscure, and its subsequent omission was wise. Thoughts of the destiny of America,[225] and of the evil and imperfection which he saw about him, hindering, as it seemed, the realisation of that destiny, and of the destiny of individual souls, must often have moved him to passionate longing. He was not one of those who confuse good with evil; he always recognised the difference between right and wrong as among the eternal distinctions which could never cease to hold true. He hated sin as he hated disease, and recognised both as threatening and actual.