EcletticaMente

Good-bye my Fancy! Farewell dear mate, dear love! I’m going away, I know not where, Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again, So Good-bye my Fancy. Now for my last—let me look back a moment; The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me, Exit, nightfall, and soon the [...]

Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well, Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch, Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn, Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping; Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting, (On earth and in the sea—the universe—the stars there in the [...]

Grand is the seen, the light, to me—grand are the sky and stars, Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary; But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing [...]

How dare one say it? After the cycles, poems, singers, plays, Vaunted Ionia’s, India’s—Homer, Shakspere—the long, long times’ thick dotted roads, areas, The shining clusters and the Milky Ways of stars—Nature’s pulses reap’d, All retrospective passions, heroes, war, love, adoration, All ages’ plummets dropt to their utmost depths, All human lives, throats, wishes, brains—all experiences’ [...]

Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable masses (even to expose them,) But add, fuse, complete, extend—and celebrate the immortal and the good. Haughty this song, its words and scope, To span vast realms of space and time, Evolution—the cumulative—growths and generations. Begun in ripen’d youth and steadily pursued, Wandering, [...]

More experiences and sights, stranger, than you’d think for; Times again, now mostly just after sunrise or before sunset, Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear weather, in plain sight, Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the shopfronts, (Account for it or not—credit or not—it is all true, And my [...]

The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas’d, The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage, The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant, Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the dissolute; (What is the part the wicked and the loathesome bear within earth’s orbic scheme?) Newts, crawling things in [...]

The commonplace I sing; How cheap is health! how cheap nobility! Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust; The open air I sing, freedom, toleration, (Take here the mainest lesson—less from books—less from the schools,) The common day and night—the common earth and waters, Your farm—your work, trade, occupation, The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground [...]