Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
[29] It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence
of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the
amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going
beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of
our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the
spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not
follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will
be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and
visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond
and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees
hitherto unknown--not only giving tone to individual character, and
making it unprecedently emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but
having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers
such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart,
without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of
perpetuating itself.
[30] I am reminded as I write that out of this very conscience, or idea
of conscience, of intense moral right, and in its name and strain'd
construction, the worst fanaticisms, wars, persecutions, murders, &c.,
have yet, in all lands, in the past, been broach'd, and have come to
their devilish fruition. Much is to be said--but I may say here, and
in response, that side by side with the unflagging stimulation of the
elements of religion and conscience must henceforth move with
equal sway, science, absolute reason, and the general proportionate
development of the whole man. These scientific facts, deductions, are
divine too--precious counted parts of moral civilization, and, with
physical health, indispensable to it, to prevent fanaticism. For
abstract religion, I perceive, is easily led astray, ever credulous, and
is capable of devouring, remorseless, like fire and flame. Conscience,
too, isolated from all else, and from the emotional nature, may but
attain the beauty and purity of glacial, snowy ice. We want, for these
States, for the general character, a cheerful, religious fervor, endued
with the ever-present modifications of the human emotions, friendship,
benevolence, with a fair field for scientific inquiry, the right of
individual judgment, and always the cooling influences of material
Nature.
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