Part 19 (1/2)

Give me exhaustless--make me a fountain, That I exhale love from me wherever I go, For the sake of all dead soldiers.

_SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE._

Spirit whose work is done! spirit of dreadful hours!

Ere, departing, fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets-- Spirit of gloomiest fears and doubts, yet onward ever unfaltering pressing!

Spirit of many a solemn day, and many a savage scene! Electric spirit!

That with muttering voice, through the years now closed, like a tireless phantom flitted, Rousing the land with breath of flame, while you beat and beat the drum; --Now, as the sound of the drum, hollow and harsh to the last, reverberates round me; As your ranks, your immortal ranks, return, return from the battles; While the muskets of the young men yet lean over their shoulders; While I look on the bayonets bristling over their shoulders; While those slanted bayonets, whole forests of them, appearing in the distance, approach and pa.s.s on, returning homeward, Moving with steady motion, swaying to and fro, to the right and left, Evenly, lightly, rising and falling, as the steps keep time: --Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day; Touch my mouth, ere you depart--press my lips close!

Leave me your pulses of rage! bequeath them to me! fill me with currents convulsive!

Let them scorch and blister out of my chants, when you are gone; Let them identify you to the future in these songs!

_RECONCILIATION._

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash again, and ever again, this soiled world.

For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead.

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near; I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

_AFTER THE WAR._

To the leavened soil they trod, calling, I sing, for the last; Not cities, nor man alone, nor war, nor the dead: But forth from my tent emerging for good--loosing, untying the tent-ropes; In the freshness, the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and vistas, again to peace restored; To the fiery fields emanative, and the endless vistas beyond--to the south and the north; To the leavened soil of the general Western World, to attest my songs, To the average earth, the wordless earth, witness of war and peace, To the Alleghanian hills, and the tireless Mississippi, To the rocks I, calling, sing, and all the trees in the woods, To the plain of the poems of heroes, to the prairie spreading wide, To the far-off sea, and the unseen winds, and the sane impalpable air.

And responding they answer all, (but not in words,) The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely; The prairie draws me close, as the father, to bosom broad, the son:-- The Northern ice and rain, that began me, nourish me to the end; But the hot sun of the South is to ripen my songs.

WALT WHITMAN

_a.s.sIMILATIONS._

1.

There was a child went forth every day; And the first object he looked upon, that object he became; And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or tretching cycles of years.

2.

The early lilacs became part of this child, And gra.s.s, and white and red morning-glories,[1] and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,[2]

And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there--and the beautiful, curious liquid, And the water-plants with their graceful fiat heads--all became part of him.

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part or him;