They spent a day in the still very young metropolis of the North-west, travelling thence by way of the Great Lakes to Buffalo. The voyage occupied five glorious summer days. Whitman went on shore at every stopping place intensely interested in everything. He was so delighted with the State of Wisconsin, which was about this time admitted to the Union, that he dreamed of settling in one of its new clean townships; and he carried away with him definite impressions of the towns of Milwaukee, Mackinaw, Detroit, Windsor, Cleveland, and Buffalo. A week from La Salle he passed under the Falls of Niagara and saw the whirlpool; but coming at the end of so much wonder, the stupendous spectacle does not seem to have greatly impressed him. Twenty-four hours of continuous travel through the thickly settled country districts of New York State brought him to the old Dutch capital of Albany, whence descending the beautiful Hudson with its wooded high-walled mountain banks, he reached New York on the evening of 15th June. He had been away from home four months, had travelled as many thousand miles, and had made acquaintance with seventeen of the States of the Union. In New Orleans he had learnt the meaning of the South, from St. Louis he had looked into the new West, while in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and the coasts of Ontario, he had seen the rich corn-lands of the North-west under their first tillage. And he had felt the meaning of the Mississippi, that great river whose tributaries, from the Alleghanies to the Rockies, drain and fertilise half the arable land of America. Besides the discovery in himself of a new world, a new hemisphere, Whitman came home filled with the sense of his American citizenship. A patriot from his childhood, from henceforward "these States," as he loved to call them, became the object of his passionate devotion. Not in their individuality alone--though this he recognised more than ever, regarding each in some degree as a nation--but above all in their Union. Thus he came back to Brooklyn to take up his old vocation and his old acquaintances with a sense of enlargement: latent powers had been awakened within him and a new ideal which may once have been a childish dream, began to dominate his manhood, hitherto lacking in a clear purpose. In the old days,[115] when his mother read the Bible to him and taught him something of its meaning, it had seemed to the child that the highest of all the achievements of manhood must be to make such another book as that. It had been written thousands of years ago by inspired men, to be completed some day by others as truly inspired as they. For he believed in the Quaker doctrine of the continuity of revelation, which is not strange to a child.