The Complete Works of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman

Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey — juice,

       Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,

       Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men.

      5

       Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials,

       America brings builders, and brings its own styles.

      The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and

       pass’d to other spheres,

       A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

      America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all

       hazards,

       Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use

       of precedents,

       Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under

       their forms,

       Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne

       from the house,

       Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was

       fittest for its days,

       That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who

       approaches,

       And that he shall be fittest for his days.

      Any period one nation must lead,

       One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

      These States are the amplest poem,

       Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,

       Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the

       day and night,

       Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,

       Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves,

       Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the

       soul loves.

      6

       Land of lands and bards to corroborate!

       Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face,

       To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d both mother’s and father’s,

       His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,

       Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,

       Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,

       Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with

       incomparable love,

       Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,

       Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,

       Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,

       Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,

       Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,

       If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he

       stretching with them North or South,

       Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between them,

       Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock,

       live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,

       Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,

       He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with

       northern transparent ice,

       Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,

       Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the

       fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,

       His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit, unclosed to good and evil,

       Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times,

       Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,

       Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle,

       The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of

       the Constitution,

       The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,

       The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable,

       The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,

       hunters, trappers,

       Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the

       gestation of new States,

       Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming

       up from the uttermost parts,

       Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially

       the young men,

       Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they

       have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the

       presence of superiors,

       The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and

       decision of their phrenology,

       The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when wrong’d,

       The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,

       good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,

       The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,

       The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement

       of the population,

       The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,

       Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points,

       Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,

       Northwest, Southwest,

       Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,

       Slavery — the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the

       ruins of all the rest,

       On and on to the grapple with it — Assassin! then your life or ours

       be the stake, and respite no more.

      7

       (Lo, high toward heaven, this day,

       Libertad, from the conqueress’ field return’d,

       I mark the new aureola around your head,

       No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,

       With war’s flames and the lambent lightnings playing,

       And your port immovable where you stand,

       With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch’d and lifted fist,

       And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly

       crush’d beneath you,

       The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his

       senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,

       The wide-swelling one, the