PIONEERS! O PIONEERS! Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes? For we cannot tarry here, We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, Pioneers! O pioneers! O you youths, Western youths, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers! See my children, resolute children, By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter, All the pulses of the world, Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat, Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us, Pioneers! O pioneers! O you daughters of the West ! O you younger and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives! Not for delectations sweet, Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious, Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment, Pioneers! O pioneers! THE CITY DEAD-HOUSE. By the city dead-house by the gate, As idly sauntering wending my way from the clangor, I curious pause, 'for lo, an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought, That house once full of passion and beauty, all else I notice not, Nor stillness so cold, nor running water from faucet, nor odors morbific impress me, But the house alone-that wondrous house-that delicate fair house—that ruin ! That immortal house more than all the rows of dwellings ever built ! Or white-domed capitol with majestic figure surmounted, or all the old high-spired cathedrals, That little house alone more than them all-poor, desperate house! Fair, fearful wreck-tenement of a soul-itself a soul, Unclaim'd, avoided house-take one breath from my tremulous lips, Take one tear dropt aside as I go for thought of you, Dead house of love-house of madness and sin, crumbled, crush'd, House of life, erewhile talking and laughing-but ah, poor house, dead even then, I accept Reality and dare not question it, Song of Myself. Stanza 23. And now gentlemen, THE BASE OF ALL METAPHYSICS. A word I give to remain in your memories and minds, As base and finale too for all metaphysics. (So to the students the old professor, At the close of his crowded course.) Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems, Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato, And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied long, I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems, See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see, Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see, The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend, Of city for city and land for land. 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. Song of the Broad-axe. Ah from a little child, Thou knowest soul how to me all sounds became music, My mother's voice in lullaby or hymn, (The voice, O tender voices, memory's loving voices, Last miracle of all, O dearest mother's, sister's, voices ;) The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav'd corn, The measur'd sea-surf beating on the sand, The twittering bird, the hawk's sharp scream, The wild-fowl's notes at night as flying low migrating north or south, The psalm in the country church or mid the clustering trees, the open air camp-meeting, The lowing cattle, bleating sheep, the crowing cock at dawn. All songs of current lands come sounding round me, Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither, Proud Music of the Storm. I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and cheerfully pass them forward. 3 Starting from Paumanok. |