O the lands! interlinked, food-yielding lands!

Land of coal and iron! Land of gold! Lands of cotton, sugar, rice!

Land of wheat, beef, pork! Land of wool and hemp ! Land of the apple and grape !

Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! Land of those sweet-aired interminable plateaus ! Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie !

Lands where the northwest Columbia winds, and where the southwest Colorado winds!

Land of the eastern Chesapeake! Land of the Delaware! Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!

Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! Land of Vermont and Connecticut!

Land of the ocean shores! Land of sierras and peaks! Land of boatmen and sailors! Fishermen's land!

Inextricable lands! the clutched together! the passionate

ones!

The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limbed !

The great women's land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the inexperienced sisters!

Far-breathed land! Arctic-braced! Mexican-breezed! the

diverse! the compact!

The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian !

O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! OI at any rate include you all with perfect love! I cannot be discharged from you—not from one, any sooner than anothe !

O Death! O !—for all that, I am yet of you unseen, this hour, with irrepressible love,

Walking New England, a friend, a traveller,

Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples, on Paumanok's sands,

Crossing the prairies—dwelling again in Chicago—dwelling in every town,

Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts, Listening to the orators and the oratresses in public halls, Of and through the States, as during life*—each man and woman my neighbour,

The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,

The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me--and I yet with any of them;

Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river—yet in my house of adobie,

Yet returning eastward—yet in the Sea-Side State, or in Maryland,

*The poet here contemplates himself as yet living spiritually and in his poems after the death of the body, still a friend and brother to all present and future American lands and persons.

Yet Canadian cheerily braving the winter—the snow and ice welcome to me, or mounting the Northern

Pacific, to Sitka, to Aliaska;

Yet a true son either of Maine, or of the Granite State,* or of the Narragansett Bay State, or of the Empire

State;†

Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same—yet welcoming every new brother;

Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones, from the hour they unite with the old ones;

Coming among the new ones myself, to be their companion and equal—coming personally to you now; Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

I6.

With me, with firm holding—yet haste, haste on.

For your life, adhere to me;

Of all the men of the earth, I only can unloose you and

toughen you;

I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself to you—but what of that?

Must not Nature be persuaded many times?

*New Hampshire.

† New York State.

No dainty dolce affettuoso I;

Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,

To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe;

For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

Here for you! and here for America!

Still the Present I raise aloft—still the future of the

States I harbinge, glad and sublime;

And for the Past, I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

The red aborigines!

Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us

for names;

Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco,

Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla

Walla;

Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names.

18.

O expanding and swift! O henceforth,

Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;

A world primal again—vistas of glory, incessant and

branching;

A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far, with new contests,

New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

These my voice announcing—I will sleep no more, but

arise;

You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

I9.

See! steamers steaming through my poems!

See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;

See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;

See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;

See pastures and forests in my poems—See animals, wild