Only a year before, in the preface to the reprint of his Dartmouth College poem,[534] he had declared that now--the Four Years' War being over, and he himself having rounded out the poem of the "Democratic Man or Woman"--he was prepared for a new enterprise. He would now set to work upon fulfilling the programme of his _Democratic Vistas_; and put the States of America hand-in-hand "in one unbroken circle in a chant". He would sing the song for which America waited, the song of the Republic that is yet to be. Again, a year earlier, he had told in his _Passage to India_ how he was ready to set forth upon the Unknown Sea. And now, with his labours unaccomplished, his heart stricken and heavy with bereavement, joylessly he seemed to hear the weighing of the anchor and to feel his ship already setting forth. Where now was the old exaltation of spirit; where the eager longing for Divine adventure with which hitherto he had always contemplated death? Now sorrow claimed him, and for a season he lost hold of joy and faith. He was as one abandoned by the Giver of Life, and isolated from Love. Thus deserted, he became utterly exhausted of vitality. It is as though for a time his soul had parted from his bodily life, and yet the life in the body must go on. If death had come now he would not have refused it; but his hour was not yet. Neither living nor dying, through the sad, dark days of long protracted illness and solitude, of physical debility and mental bewilderment--as it were, through year-long dream-gropings--he waited. The light of his life seemed suddenly to have gone out.[535] Near as he had dwelt to death, in the tragedy of the war-hospitals and in the habit of his thought, he was wholly unprepared for the death of his mother. He was a man upon whose large harmonious and resonant nature every tragic experience struck out its fullest note. Philosophy and religion were his, if they were any man's; but he was not one of those who escape experience in the byways of abstraction. He took each blow full in his breast. His mother was dead; that was the physical wrench which crippled him body and soul. He could not accustom himself to her death and departure.[536] He could not understand it, nor why he was so stricken by it. It seemed as though in her life his mother had given to her son something that was essential to that soul-consciousness in which he had lived, and that her death had broken his own life asunder, so that it was no longer harmonious and triumphant.