Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
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Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
And now, for fear of mistake, we may not intermit to beg our absolution
from all that genuinely is, or goes along with, even Culture. Pardon us,
venerable shade! if we have seem'd to speak lightly of your office. The
whole civilization of the earth, we know, is yours, with all the glory
and the light thereof. It is, indeed, in your own spirit, and seeking to
tally the loftiest teachings of it, that we aim these poor utterances.
For you, too, mighty minister! know that there is something greater than
you, namely, the fresh, eternal qualities of Being. From them, and by
them, as you, at your best, we too evoke the last, the needed help, to
vitalize our country and our days. Thus we pronounce not so much against
the principle of culture; we only supervise it, and promulge along with
it, as deep, perhaps a deeper, principle. As we have shown the New World
including in itself the all-leveling aggregate of democracy, we show
it also including the all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of
individuality, and erecting therefor a lofty and hitherto unoccupied
framework or platform, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer
and mechanic--to the female equally with the male--a towering selfhood,
not physically perfect only--not satisfied with the mere mind's and
learning's stores, but religious, possessing the idea of the infinite,
(rudder and compass sure amid this troublous voyage, o'er darkest,
wildest wave, through stormiest wind, of man's or nation's
progress)--realizing, above the rest, that known humanity, in deepest
sense, is fair adhesion to itself, for purposes beyond--and that,
finally, the personality of mortal life is most important with reference
to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the only permanently real,
which as the ocean waits for and receives the rivers, waits for us each
and all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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