How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my Soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect, The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids are perfect; Slowly and surely they have passed on to this, and slowly and surely they yet pass on. My Soul! if I realise you, I have satisfaction; Animals and vegetables! if I realise you, I have satisfaction; Laws of the earth and air! if I realise you, I have satisfaction. I cannot define my satisfaction, yet it is so; I cannot define my life, yet it is so. 11. It comes to me now! I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal soul! The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the animals! I swear I think there is nothing but immortality! That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it; And all preparation is for it! and identity is for it! and life and death are altogether for it! _THIS COMPOST._ 1. Something startles me where I thought I was safest; I withdraw from the still woods I loved; I will not go now on the pastures to walk; I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea; I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me. 2. O how can the ground not sicken? How can you be alive, you growths of spring? How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distempered corpses in you? Is not every continent worked over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations; Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day--or perhaps I am deceived; I will run a furrow with my plough--I will press my spade through the sod, and turn it up underneath; I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. 3. Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person--Yet behold! The grass covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatched eggs, The new-born of animals appear--the calf is dropped from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark-green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk; The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.