Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow'd yet proud, the suffering and the struggle?

The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day or night?

Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space?

Prophetic joys of better, loftier love's ideals, the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade?

Joys all thine own undying one, joys worthy thee O soul.

O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,

To meet life as a powerful conqueror,

No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,

To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable,

And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

For not life's joys alone I sing, repeating the joy of death!

The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons,

Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn'd, or render'd to powder, or buried,

My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres, My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications, further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

O to attract by more than attraction!

How it is I know not-yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest,

It is offensive, never defensive-yet how magnetic it draws.

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!

To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!

To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!

To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns

with perfect nonchalance !

To be indeed a God!

O to sail to sea in a ship!

To leave this steady unendurable land,

To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the houses,

To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,

To sail and sail and sail!

O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!

To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on !

To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,

A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)

A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE

A great city is that which has the greatest men and

women,

If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,

Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-lifters of the departing,

Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth,

Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where money is plentiest,

Nor the place of the most numerous population.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,

Where the city stands that is belov'd by these, and loves them in return and understands them,

Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,

Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place, Where the men and women think lightly of the laws, Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases, Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons,

Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of death pours its sweeping and unript waves, Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority,

Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for

pay,

Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on themselves,

Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,

Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,

Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men,

Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,

Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,

Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
There the great city stands.

How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed! How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a man's or woman's look!

All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears; A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe,

When he or she appears materials are overaw'd,

The dispute on the soul stops,

The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn'd back, or laid away.

What is your money-making now? what can it do now? What is your respectability now?

What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statutebooks, now?

Where are your jibes of being now?

Where are your cavils about the soul now?

SONG OF THE EXPOSITION

(Ah little recks the laborer,

How near his work is holding him to God.
The loving Laborer through space and time.)

After all not to create only, or found only,

But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,
To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,
Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,
To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,
These also are the lessons of our New World;

While how little the New after all, how much the Old,
Old World!

Long and long has the grass been growing,
Long and long has the rain been falling,
Long has the globe been rolling round.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,

Cross out please those immensly overpaid accounts,

That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Æneas', Odysseus' wanderings,

Placard "Removed" and "To Let " on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,

Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and on Mount Moriah,

The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections,

For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.

Responsive to our summons,

Or rather to her long-nurs'd inclination,
Join'd with an irresistible, natural gravitation,
She comes! I hear the rustling of her gown,

I scent the odor of her breath's delicious fragrance,

I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling, Upon this very scene.

The dame of dames! can I believe then,

Those ancient temples, sculptures classic, could none of them retain her?

Nor shades of Virgil and Dante, nor myriad memories, poems, old associations, magnetize and hold on to her? But that she's left them all and here?

Yes, if you will allow me to say so,

I, my friends, if you do not, can plainly see her,

The same undying soul of earth's, activity's, beauty's, heroism's expression,

Out from her evolutions hither come, ended the strata of her former themes,

Hidden and cover'd by to-day's, foundation of to-day's, Ended, deceas'd through time, her voice by Castaly's fountain,

Silent the broken-lipp'd Sphynx in Egypt, silent all those century-baffling tombs,

Ended for aye the epics of Asia's, Europe's helmeted warriors, ended the primitive call of the muses,

Calliope's call forever closed, Clio, Melpomene, Thalia dead,

Ended the stately rhythmus of Una and Oriana, ended the quest of the holy Graal,