Thus made, literature will for the first time be worthy to quicken and immortalise the life of America.[515] It will feed the infant life of the real nation. Reading it, Americans will become aware at last of their world-destiny; and they will face the whole of life and death with a new faith and joy. America will become not merely a new world, but the mother of new worlds:[516] and lowering as the skies must often be, and tragic though the day's end, she will behold the stars beyond. * * * * * Such, in crudest outline, is the gist of Whitman's tractate; which, with the fifth edition of the _Leaves_, appeared early in 1871. _Leaves of Grass_ now included _Drum-taps_; but the poems of President Lincoln's death, with other matter suggested by the close of the war, were separately published in a little volume of 120 pages, which, while containing poems upon the lines suggested in _Democratic Vistas_, and reverting again to old themes, was more especially marked by those in which the idea of death as a voyage upon an unknown sea is dominant. [Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF MS. BY WHITMAN, BELONGING PROBABLY TO 1875] The little book was called _Passage to India_, after the opening poem; and it has a completeness of its own, closing with a "Now Finalé to the Shore". In its preface, he alludes to a plan which he had entertained--his active imagination entertained so many plans which he never realised![517]--the scheme of a new volume to companion and complement the _Leaves_, suggestive of death and the disembodied soul, as the _Leaves_ were of the life in the body. He found, however, that the body was not so soon to be put aside; to the end, its hold upon him was extraordinarily tenacious. Doubting his ability for the task, he became content to offer a fragment and hint of what he had intended. _Passage to India_ is among his finest efforts.[518] Some of its single lines ring like clear bells, while the movement of the whole is varied, solemn and majestic. He shows his reader how the enterprise and invention of the world is binding all lands together to complete the "rondure" of the earth. The opening of the Suez Canal and of the Pacific Railroad are fulfilling the dream of the Genoese, who sought a passage to India in the circumnavigation of the world. But, says Whitman, with that characteristic mystical touch which is never absent in his poems, it is only the poet who conceives of the world as really one and round. For none but he understands that the universe is essentially one, Soul and Matter, Nature and Man. To the mystic sense, India becomes symbolic of all the first elemental intuitions of the human race. Thither now again the poet leads his nation, back to its first visions and back to God.