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
As, within the purposes of the Kosmos, and vivifying all meteorology,
and all the congeries of the mineral, vegetable and animal worlds--all
the physical growth and development of man, and all the history of the
race in politics, religions, wars, &c., there is a moral purpose, a
visible or invisible intention, certainly underlying all--its results
and proof needing to be patiently waited for--needing intuition,
faith, idiosyncrasy, to its realization, which many, and especially
the intellectual, do not have--so in the product, or congeries of
the product, of the greatest literatus. This is the last, profoundest
measure and test of a first-class literary or esthetic achievement, and
when understood and put in force must fain, I say, lead to works, books,
nobler than any hitherto known. Lo! Nature, (the only complete, actual
poem,) existing calmly in the divine scheme, containing all, content,
careless of the criticisms of a day, or these endless and wordy
chatterers. And lo! to the consciousness of the soul, the permanent
identity, the thought, the something, before which the magnitude even
of democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes partial,
measurable--something that fully satisfies, (which those do not.) That
something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea
of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing
space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And again lo!
the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever--the eternal
beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things--wherefrom I feel
and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but rather the
real beginning--and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die,
nor soul, nor matter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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