WHAT BEST I SEE IN THEE1

TO U. S. G. RETURN'D FROM HIS WORLD'S

TOUR

WHAT best I see in thee,

Is not that where thou mov'st down history's

great highways,

Ever undimm'd by time shoots warlike victory's dazzle,

Or that thou sat'st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace,

Or thou the man whom feudal Europe fêted, venerable Asia swarm'd upon,

Who walk'd with kings with even pace the round world's promenade;

But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,

Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,

Ohio's, Indiana's millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,

Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world's promenade, Were all so justified.

1881.

1 So General Grant, after circumambiating the world, has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration — his life of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering what the people can see in Grant' to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities (history has presented none more trying, no born monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy), may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself with credit year after year-command over a million armed men - fight more than fifty pitch'd battles rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined - and then, retiring, quietly (with a cigar in his mouth), make the promenade of the whole world, through its courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people like - and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man-no art, no poetry-only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to do, what devolv'd upor him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secessionPresident following (a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself)-nothing hercic, as the authorities put it and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him. (Specimen Days, September 27, 1879. Complete Prose Works, pp. 146, 147.) See also Whitman's poem: On the Death of General Grant.'

SPIRIT THAT FORM'D THIS
SCENE 2

WRITTEN IN PLATTE CAÑON, COLORADO
SPIRIT that form'd this scene,

These tumbled rock-piles grim and red, These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks, These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,

These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,

I know thee, savage spirit—we have communed together,

Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;

Was't charged against my chants they had forgotten art?

To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse ?

The lyrist's measur'd beat, the wrought-out temple's grace— column and polish'd arch forgot?

But thou that revelest here form'd this scene,

They have remember'd thee.

- spirit that

1881.

2 Compare Whitman's entry in his journal during his trip through Colorado:

'I have found the law of my own poems,' was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature - the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles - the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness - the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high-at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. (In Nature's grandest shows,' says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.')

We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly -mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us every rood a new view flashing and each flash defying description - - on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass - but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen- all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can. (Specimen Days. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., p. 136.)

WITH husky-haughty lips, O sea! Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,

Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions

(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here),

Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,

Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the sun,

Thy brooding scowl and murk-thy unloos'd hurricanes,

1 Compare the passages in Whitman's Prose Works referred to in the notes on pp. 564 and 579.

2 July 25, '81. Far Rockaway, L. I.-A good day here, on a jaunt, amid the sand and salt, a steady breeze setting in from the sea, the sun shining, the sedge-odor, the noise of the surf, a mixture of hissing and booming, the milk-white crests curling over. I had a leisurely bath and naked ramble as of old, on the warm-gray shore-sands, my companions off in a boat in deeper water-(I shouting to them Jupiter's menaces against the gods, from Pope's Homer.) (Specimen Daus. Complete Prose Works, Small, Maynard & Co., pp. 176, 177.)

Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness; Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears- - a lack from all eternity in thy content, (Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee greatest-no less could make thee,)

Thy lonely state-something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet never gain'st, Surely some right withheld some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedomlover pent,

Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those breakers,

By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath,

And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and

waves,

And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,

And undertones of distant lion roar, (Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear but now, rapport for once,

A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)

The first and last confession of the globe, Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms,

The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.

1884. (1888.)

OF THAT BLITHE THROAT OF THINE

[More than eighty-three degrees north-about a good day's steaming distance to the Pole by one of our fast oceaners in clear water-Greely the explorer heard the song of a single snow-bird merrily sounding over the desolation.]

OF that blithe throat of thine from arctie bleak and blank,

I'll mind the lesson, solitary bird - let me too welcome chilling drifts,

E'en the profoundest chill, as now-a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv'd,

Old age land-lock'd within its winter bay (cold, cold, O cold!)

These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet,

For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last;

Not summer's zones alone-not chants of youth, or south's warm tides alone,

1 Compare, in Complete Prose Works, p. 190, the letter of May 31, 1882: From to-day I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain'd, with varying course -seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day-now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles- live largely in the open air-am sunburnt and stout (weigh 190), keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day. About two thirds of the time I am quite comfortable. What mentality I ever had remains entirely unaffected; though physically I am a half-paralytic, and likely to be so, long as I live. But the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish'd-I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives and of enemies I really make no account.'

NOT to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable masses (even to expose them),

- and

But add, fuse, complete, extend
celebrate the immortal and the good.

Haughty this song, its words and scope,
To span vast realms of space and time,
Evolution- the cumulative - growths and
generations.

Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued,

Wandering, peering, dallying with allwar, peace, day and night absorbing, Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,

I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.

I sing of life, yet mind me well of death: To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has for years Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.

I'm going away, I know not where, Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,

So Good-bye my Fancy.

Now for my last moment;

- let me look back a

The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,

Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together; Delightful!now separation - Good-bye my Fancy.

Yet let me not be too hasty,

Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended into one;

Then if we die we die together (yes, we 'll remain one),

If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,

May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,

May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?) May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning so now finally, Good-bye and hail! my Fancy.

DEATH'S VALLEY

1891.

To accompany a picture; by request. The Valley of the Shadow of Death,' from the painting by George Inness.

NAY, do not dream, designer dark,

Thou hast portray'd or hit thy theme entire;