 section 14 of specimen days this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org specimen days by Walt Whitman section 14 begin a long joint West the following three or four months September to December 79 I made quite a Western journey fetching up at Denver Colorado and penetrating the Rocky Mountain region enough to get a good notion of it all left West Philadelphia after 9 o'clock one night middle of September in a comfortable sleeper oblivious of the two or three hundred miles across Pennsylvania at Pittsburgh in the morning to breakfast pretty good view of the city and Birmingham fog and damp smoke coke furnaces flames discoloured wooden houses and vast collections of coal barges presently a bit of fine region West Virginia the Panhandle and crossing the River the Ohio by day through the latter state then Indiana and so rocked to slumber for a second night flying like lightning through Illinois in the sleeper what a fierce weird pleasure to lie in my birth at night in the luxurious palace car drawn by the mighty Baldwin embodying and filling me to full of the swiftest motion and most resist the strength it is late perhaps midnight or after distances joined like magic as we speed through Harrisburg Columbus Indianapolis the element of danger and zest to it all on we go rumbling and flashing with our loud whiney thrown out from time to time or trumpet blasts into the darkness passing the homes of men the farms barns cattle the silent villages and the car itself the sleeper with curtains drawn and lights turned down in the births the slumberers many of them women and children as on on on we fly like lightning through the night how strangely sound and sweet they sleep they say the French bolt air in his time designated the grand opera and a ship of war the most signal illustrations of the growth of humanities and arts advance beyond primitive barbarism perhaps if the witty philosopher were here these days and went in the same car with perfect bedding and feed from New York to San Francisco he would shift his type and sample to one of our American sleepers Missouri State we should have made the run of 960 miles from Philadelphia to st. Louis in 36 hours but we had a collision and bad locomotive smash about two-thirds of the way which set us back so merely stopping overnight that time in st. Louis I spent on Westwood as I crossed Missouri State the whole distance by the st. Louis and Kansas City Northern Railroad a fine early autumn day I thought my eyes had never looked on scenes a greater pastoral beauty for over 200 miles successive rolling prairies agriculturally perfect feud by Pennsylvania and New Jersey ice and dotted here and there with fine timber yet fine as the land is it isn't the finest portion there is a bed of impervious clay and hard pan beneath this section that holds water too firmly drowns the land in wet weather and begs it to dry as a cynical farmer told me south are some richer tracks though perhaps the beauty spots of the state are the Northwestern counties all together I am clear now and from what I have seen and learned since that Missouri in climate soil relative situation wheat grass mines railroads and every important materialistic respect stands in the front rank of the Union of Missouri averaged politically and socially I have heard all sorts of talk some pretty severe but I should have no fear myself of getting along safely and comfortably anywhere among the Missourians they raise a good deal of tobacco you see at this time quantities of the light greenish gray leaves pulled and hanging out to dry on temporary frameworks or rows of sticks looks much like the merely and familiar to eastern eyes Lawrence and Topeka Kansas we thought of stopping in Kansas City but when we got there we found a train ready and a crowd of hospitable Kansyans to take us on to Lawrence to which I proceeded I shall not soon forget my good days in our in company with Judge Usher and his sons especially John and Linton true Westerners of the noblest type nor the similar days in Topeka nor the brotherly kindness of my friends there and the city and state officials Lawrence and Topeka are large bustling half rural handsome cities I took two or three long drives about the latter drawn by a spirited team over smooth roads the prairies and and speech at a large popular meeting at Topeka the Kansas State silver wedding 15 or 20,000 people I had been erroneously bill to deliver a poem as I seem to be much of and wanted to be good natured I hastily penciled out the following little speech unfortunately or fortunately I had such a good time and rest and talk and dinner with the you boys that I let the hour slip away and didn't drive over to the meeting and speak my peace but here it is just the same my friends your bills announce me as giving a poem but I have no poem have composed none for this occasion and I can honestly say I am now glad of it under these guys resplendent in September beauty amid the peculiar landscape you are used to but which is new to me these interminable and stately prairies in the freedom and vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect Western air and autumn sunshine it seems to me a poem would be almost an impertinent but if you care to have a word from me I should speak it about these very prairies they impressed me most of all the object shows I see or have seen on this my first real visit to the West as I have rolled rapidly hither for more than a thousand miles through fair Ohio through bread-raising Indiana and Illinois through ample Missouri that contains and raises everything as I have partially explored your charming city during the last two days and standing on our at Hill by the University have launched my view across broad expanses of living green in every direction I have a game been most impressed I say and shall remain for the rest of my life impressed with that feature of the topography of your Western Central world that vast something stretching out on its own unbounded scale unconfined which there is in these prairies combining the real and ideal and beautiful as dreams I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know how much of first-class art they have in these prairies how original and all-your-own how much of the influences of a character for your future humanity broad patriotic heroic and new how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of skies of heaven and the ocean with its waters how freeing soothing nourishing they are to the soul then is it not subtly that who have given us our leading modern Americans Lincoln and Grant vast spread average men their foregrounds of character all together practical and real yet to those who have eyes to see with finest backgrounds of the ideal towering high as any and do we not see in them foreshadowings of the future races that shall fill these prairies not but what the Yankee and Atlantic states and every other part Texas and the states flanking the southeast and the Gulf of Mexico the Pacific shore empire the territories and lakes and the Canada line the day is not yet but it will come including Canada entire equally an integrally and in the solubility this nation the synchron of the human political and commercial new world but this favored central area of in round numbers two thousand miles square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America's distinctive ideas and distinctive realities on to Denver a frontier incident the joint of five or six hundred miles from Topeka to Denver took me through a variety of country but all unmistakable prolific Western American and on the larger scale for a long distance we follow the line at the Kansas River I like better the old name call a stretch of very rich dark soil famed for its wheat and called the golden belt then planes and planes hour after hour Elthworth County the center of the state where I must stop a moment to tell a characteristic story of early days seen the very spot where I am passing time 1868 in a scrimmage at some public gathering in the town a had shot be quite badly but had not killed him the sober men of Elthworth conferred with one another and decided that a deserved punishment as they wish to set a good example and establish their reputation the reverse of a lynching town they opened an informal court and bring both men before them the deliberate trial soon as this trial begins the wounded man is led forward to give his testimony seeing his enemy in endurance and unarmed be walked suddenly up in a fury and shoots a through the head shoots him dead the court is instantly adjourned and it is unanimous members without a word of debate walk the murderer be out wounded as he is and hung him in due time we reached Denver which city I fall in love with from the first and have that feeling confirmed the longer I stay there one of my placenta stays was a dirt via plateau Canyon to Leadville an hour on Kenosha summit jottings from the Rocky Mountains mostly penciled during a day's trip over the South Park are returning from Leadville and especially the hour we were detained much to my satisfaction at Kenosha summit as afternoon advances novelties far-reaching splendors accumulate under the bright Sun in this pure air but I had better commence with the day the confronting a plateau Canyon just adorn after a 10 miles ride in early darkness on the rail from Denver the seasonable stockage at the entrance of the Canyon and good breakfast of eggs trout and nice griddle cakes then as we travel on and get well in the gorge all the wonders beauty savage power of the scene the wild stream of water from sources of snows brawling continually in sight one side the dazzling Sun the morning lights on the rocks such turns and grades in the track squirming around corners or up and down hills far glimpses of the hundred peaks Titanic necklaces stretching north and south this huge rightly named dome rock and as we dash along other similar simple monolithic elephantine an egotistical find I have found the law of my own poems was there unspoken but more and more decided feeling that came to me as I passed hour after hour and made all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon this plentitude of material entire absence of art untrammeled play of primitive nature the chasm the gorge the crystal mountain stream repeated scores hundreds of miles the broad handling and absolute unscrampedness the fantastic forms bathed in transparent browns faint reds and greys towering sometimes a thousand sometimes two or three thousand feet high at their tops now and then huge masses poised and mixing with the clouds with only their outlines hazed in misty lilac visible in nature's grander shows says an old archrider an ecclesiastic amid the ocean's depth if so might be all countless worlds rolling above at night a man thinks of them ways all not for themselves or the abstract but with reference to his own personality and how they may affect him or color his destinies new senses new joys we follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed with its frequent cascades and snow white foam through the canyon we fly mountains not only each side but seemingly till we get near right in front of us every rude a new view flashing and each flash defying description on the almost perpendicular sides clinging pines cedars spruces crimson some ash bushes spots the wild grass but dominating all those towering rocks rocks rocks bathed in delicate very colors with the clear sky of autumn overhead new senses new joys seemed developed talkers you like a typical rocky mountain canyon or a limitless sea like stretch of the Great Kansas or Colorado Plains under favoring circumstances tallies perhaps expresses certainly awaits those grandest and subtlest element emotions in the human soul that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thor Wildston all paintings poems reminences or even music probably never can steam power telegraphs etc. I get out on ten minute stoppage a dear creek to enjoy the unequalled combination of hill stone and wood as we speed again the yellow granite in the sunshine with natural spires minarets castled perches far a lot then long stretches of straight upright palisades rhinoceros color then gambos and tinted cromos ever the best of my pleasures the cool fresh Colorado atmosphere yet sufficiently warm signs of man's restless advent and pioneering hard as nature's faces deserted dugouts by dozens in the side hills the scanting hut the telegraph pole the smoke of some impromptu chimney or outdoor fire at intervals like settlements of log houses or parties of surveyors or telegraph builders with their comfortable tents once a canvas office where you could send a message by electricity anywhere around the world yes pronounced signs of the man of latest dates dauntlessly grappling with these grizzliest shows of the old cosmos at several places steam saw mills with their piles of logs and boards and the pipes puffing occasionally plateau canyon expanding into a grassy flat at the few acres at one such place toward the end where we stop and I get out to stretch my legs as I look skyward all rather mountain topwood a huge hawk or eagle a rare sight here is idly sowing balancing along the ether now sinking low and coming quite near and then up again in stately-language circles then higher higher slanting to the north and gradually out of sight America's backbone I jot these lines literally a Kenosha summit where we return afternoon and take a long rest 10,000 feet above sea level at this immense height the South Park stretches 50 miles before me mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective every hue of vista fringe the view in nearer or middle or far dim distance or fade on the horizon we have now reached penetrated the Rockies Hayden calls it the front range for a hundred miles or so and though these chains spread away in every direction especially north and south thousands and thousands father I have seen specimens of the utmost of them and no hints for at least what they are and what they look like not themselves alone for they typify stretches and areas of half the globe are in fact the vertebrae or backbone of our hemisphere as the anatomists say a man is only a spine topped footed breasted and radiated so the whole Western world is in a sense but an expansion of these mountains in South America they are the Andes in Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras and in our states they go under different names in California the coast and cascade ranges then small eastwardly the Sierra Navadas but mainly and more centrally here the Rocky Mountains proper with many an elevation such as Lincoln Grays harbours yales longs and pikes peaks all over 14,000 feet high east the highest peaks of the elegannies the adironducks the cat skills and the white mountains range from 2,000 to 5,000 feet only Mount Washington in the latter 6,300 feet the parks in the midst of all here lies such beautiful contrasts as the sunken basins of the North middle and South parks the latter I am now on one side of and overlooking each the size of a large level grassy Western County walled in by walls of hills and each park the source of the river the ones I specify are the largest in Colorado but the whole of that state and of Wyoming Utah Nevada and Western California through their Sierra's and ravines are copiously marked by similar spreads and openings many of the small ones of paradisiac loveliness and perfection with their offsets of mountains streams atmosphere and hues beyond compare art features talk I say again of going to Europe of visiting the ruins of feudal castles or Coliseum remains or King's palaces when you can come here the alternations one gets to after the Illinois and Kansas prairies of a thousand miles smooth and easy areas of the corn and wheat of 10 million Democratic farms in the future here start up in every conceivable presentation of show these non-neutral terri and piles coping the skies emanating a beauty terror power more than Dante or Angelo ever knew yes I think the child of not only poetry and painting but oratory and even the metaphysics and music fit for the new world before being finally assimilated knee-first and feeding visits here mountain streams the spiritual contrast and ether reality at the whole region consists largely to me in its never absent peculiar streams the snows of inaccessible upper areas melting and running down through the gorges continually nothing like the water of pastoral plains or creeks with wooded banks and turf or anything of the kind elsewhere the shapes that element takes in the shows of the globe cannot be fully understood by an artist until he has studied these unique rivulets aerial effects but perhaps as I gaze around me the rare aside of all is in atmospheric hues the prairies as I cross them in my journey hither and these mountains and parks seem to me to afford new lights and shades everywhere the aerial gradations and sky effects in the metal walk nowhere else such perspectives such transparent lilacs and grays I can conceive of some superior landscape painter some fine colorist after sketching a while out here discarding all these previous work delightful to stock exhibition amateurs as muddy raw and artificial near ones I ranges an infinite variety high up the bare whitey brown above timber line in certain spots are far patches of snow any time of year no trees no flowers no birds at those chilling altitudes as I write I see the snowy range through the blue mist beautiful and far off I plainly see the patches of snow Denver impressions through the long lingering half-flight of the most superb of evenings we return to Denver where I stayed several days leisurely exploring receiving impressions with which I may as well taper off this memorandum itemizing what I saw there the best was the men three-fourths of them large able calm allude American and cash why they created here out in the smelting works the biggest and most improved ones for the precious metals in the world I saw long rows of vats pans covered by bubbling boiling water and filled with pure silver four or five inches thick many thousand dollars worth in a pan the foreman who was showing me shoveled it carelessly up with the little wooden shovel as one might toss beans then large silver bricks worth two thousand dollars a brick dozens of piles twenty in a pile in one place in the mountains at a mining camp I had a few days before seeing rough bullion on the ground in the open air like the confectioners pyramids at some swell dinner in New York such a sweet morsel to roll over with the poor author's pen and ink and appropriate to slip in here that the silver product of Colorado and Utah and the gold product of California New Mexico Nevada and Dakota puts up an addition to the world's coin of considerably over a hundred millions every year a city this Denver well laid out Laramie Street and 15th and 16th and Champa streets with others particularly fine some with tall store houses of stone or iron and windows of plate glass all the streets with little canals of mountain water running along the sides plenty of people business modernist yet not without certain Rosie all its own a place of fast horses many mares with their colts and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope hunting now and then groups of moaners some just come in some starting out very picturesque one of the papers here interviewed me and reported me as saying offhand I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the Atlantic third of the Republic Boston Brooklyn with its heels new Orleans Baltimore stately Washington broad Philadelphia teaming Cincinnati and Chicago and for 30 years in that wonder washed by hurried and glittering tides my own New York not only the new world's but the world's city but newcomer to Denver as I am and threading its streets breathing its air warmed by its sunshine and having that there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flushed upon me now for only three or four days I am very much like a man feel sometimes towards certain people he meets with and warms to and hardly knows why I too can hardly tell why but as I entered the city in the slight haze of a late September afternoon and have briefed its air and slept well I know it's and have roamed or rode leisurely and watched the comers and girls at the hotels and absorb the climatic magnetism of this curiously attractive region there has steadily grown upon me a feeling of affection for the spot which sudden as it is has become so definite and strong that I must put it on record so much for the feeling toward the Queen City at the plains and peaks where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere over 5,000 feet above sea level irrigated by mountain streams one way looking east over the prairies for a thousand miles and having the other Westwood in constant view by day draped in their violet haze mountaintops innumerable yes I fell in love with Denver and even felt a wish to spend my declining and dying days there I turned south and then east again leave Denver at 8 a.m. by the Rio Grande RR going south mountains constantly inside in the apparently near distance failed slightly but still clear and very grand their cones colors sides distinct against the sky hundreds it seemed thousands interminable necklaces of them their tops and slopes hazed more or less slightly in that blue gray under the autumn Sun for over a hundred miles the most spiritual show of objective nature I ever beheld or even thought possible occasionally the light strengthens making a contrast of yellow tinge silver on one side with dark and shade of gray on the other I took a long look at Pike's Peak and was a little disappointed I suppose I had expected something stunning our view over plains to the left stretches Ampley with corals here and there the frequent cacti and wild sage and herds of cattle feeding thus about 120 miles to Pueblo at that town we board the comfortable and well-equipped at Chisholm to Pica and Santa Fe are now striking east unfulfilled wants the Arkansas River I had wanted to go to the Yellowstone River region wanted specially to see the National Park and the geysers and the hoodoo or Goblin land of that country indeed hesitated a little at Pueblo the turning point wanted to thread the better pass wanted to go over the Santa Fe trail away south westwood to New Mexico but turned and set my face eastward leaving behind me wet and glimpses taste at southeastern Colorado Pueblo Bald Mountain the Spanish Peaks San Diego Christo mile shoe curve which my veteran friend on the locomotive told me was the boss railroad curve of the universe Fort Garland on the plains better and the three great peaks at the Sierra Blankers the Arkansas River plays quite a part in the whole of this region I see it or its high cut rocky northern shore for miles and cross and recross it frequently the plains very here even more than usual sometimes the long sterile stretch of scores of miles then green fertile and grassy and equal length some very large hoods of sheep one wants new words in writing about these planes and all the inland American West the terms far large vast etc are insufficient the silent little follow the caropsis here I must say a word about a little follower present even now before my eyes I have been accompanied on my whole journey from Barnagat to Pikes Peak by a pleasant floricultural friend or rather millions of friends nothing more or less than a hardy little yellow five petal September and October wildflower growing I think everywhere in the middle and northern United States I had seen it on the Hudson and over Long Island and along the banks at the Delaware and through New Jersey as years ago up in the Connecticut and one fall by Lake Champlain this trip it followed me regularly and its slender stem and eyes of gold from Cape May to the core valley and so through the canyons and to these planes in Missouri I saw immense fields all bright with it toward Western Illinois I woke up one morning in the sleeper and the first thing when I drew the curtain of my birth and look down was its pretty countenance and bending neck September 25th early morning still going east after we leave sterling Kansas where I stopped a day and night the sun up about half an hour nothing can be pressure or more beautiful than this time this region I see quite a field of my yellow flower in full bloom at intervals dots of nice two-story houses as we ride swiftly by over the immense area flat as a floor visible for 20 miles in every direction in the clear air a prevalence of autumn drab and reddish tourney herbage spare stacks of hay and enclosures breaking the landscape as we rumble by flocks of prairie hens starting up between sterling and Florence a fine country remembrances to E.L. my old young soldier friend of war times and his wife and boy at s the prairies and great planes in poetry after traveling Illinois Missouri Kansas and Colorado grand as is the thought that doubtless the child is already born who will see a hundred millions of people the most prosperous and advanced at the world inhabiting these prairies the great planes and the valley of the Mississippi I could not help thinking it would be grander still to see all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem or other aesthetic work entirely Western fresh and limitless all together our own without a trace or taste of Europe soil reminiscence technical letter or spirit my days and nights as I travel here what an exhilaration not the air alone and the sense of vastness but every local site and feature everywhere something characteristic the cactuses pinks buffalo grass wild sage the receding perspective and the far circle wine of the horizon all times of day especially for new the clear pure cool rarefied nutriment of the lungs previously quite unknown the black patches and streaks left by surface conflagrations the deep-plowed furrow of the fire guard the slanting snow wrecks built all along to shield the railroad from winter drifts the prairie dogs and the herds of antelope the curious dry rivers occasionally a dugout fought Riley and fought Wallace these towns of the northern plains like ships on the sea eagle tail coyote Cheyenne a gay monotony Kit Carson with ever the antel and the buffalo wallow ever the herds of cattle and the cowboys cow punches to me a strangely interesting class bright-eyed as Hawks with this for the complexions and their broad-brimmed hats apparently always on horseback with loose arms slightly raised and swinging as they ride the Spanish peaks evening on the plains between pure blow and bends for southward in a clear afternoon Sun spell I catch exceptionally good glimpses of the Spanish peaks we are in southeastern Colorado past immense herds of cattle as our first-class locomotive rushes us along two or three times crossing their Kansas which we follow many miles and of which river I get fine views sometimes quite a distance it's stony upright not very high palisade banks and then it's muddy flats we pass Fort Lyon lots of adobe houses limitless pastridge appropriately flicked with those herds of cattle in due time the declining Sun in the West a sky of limpered pearl overall and so evening on the great plains a calm pensive boundless landscape the perpendicular rocks of the North a Kansas shewed in twilight a thin line of violet on the southwestern horizon the pulpable coolness and slight aroma a belated cowboy with some unruly member of his herd an immigrant wagon toiling yet a little further the horse is slow and tired two men apparently father and son jogging along on foot and around all the indescribable Gio Oscaro and sentiment profounder than anything you'd see or thought these endless wilds America's characteristic landscape speaking generally as the capacity ensure future destiny of that plain and prairie area larger than any European kingdom it is the inexhaustible land of wheat maize wool flakes coal iron beef and pork butter and cheese apples and grapes land of 10 million virgin farms to the eye at present wild and unproductive yet experts say that upon it when irrigated may easily be grown enough wheat to feed the world then as to the scenery giving my own thought and feeling while I know the standard claim is the ghostman no angra falls the upper Yellowstone and the life afford the greatest natural shows I am not so sure but the prairies and the plains while less stunning at the first sight last longer fill the aesthetic sense for proceed all the rest and make North America's characteristic landscape indeed through the whole of this journey with all its shows and varieties what most impressed me and will longest remain with me are these same prairies day after day and night after night to my eyes to all my senses the aesthetic one most of all they silently and broadly unfold even their simplest statistics are sublime earth's most important stream the valley of the Mississippi River and its tributaries this stream and its agents involve a big part of the question comprehends more than 1200 thousand square miles the greater part prairies it is by far the most important stream on the globe and would seem to have been marked out by design slow flowing from North to South through a dozen climates all fitted the man's healthy occupancy its outlet unfrozen all the year and its line forming a safe cheap continental avenue the commerce and passage from the North temperate to the torrid zone not even the mighty Amazon larger in volume on its line of East and West not the Nile in Africa nor the Danube in Europe nor the three great rivers of China compare with it only the Mediterranean Sea has played some such part in history and all through the past as the Mississippi is destined to play in the future by its domestic watered and welded by its branches the Missouri the Ohio the Kansas the red the zoo the St. Francis and others it already compacts 25 millions of people not merely the most peaceful and money-making but the most restless and more like on earth its valley or reach is rapidly concentrating the political power of the American Union one almost thinks it is the Union or soon will be take it out with its radiations and what would be left from the car windows through Indiana Illinois Missouri or stopping some days along the Topeka and Santa Fe Road in Southern Kansas and indeed wherever I went hundreds and thousands of miles through this region my eyes feasted on primitive and rich meadows some of them partially inhabited but far immensely far more untouched unbroken and much of it more lovely and fertile in its unplowed innocence than the fair and valuable fields of New York's Pennsylvania's Maryland's or Virginia's richest farms prairie analogies the tree question the word prairie is French and means literally meadow the Cosmical analogies of our North American planes are the steeps of Asia the Pampers and Lannis of South America and perhaps the Saharas of Africa some think the planes have been originally like beds others attribute the absence of forests to the fires that almost annually sweep over them the cause in vulgar estimation of Indian summer the tree question will soon become a grave one although the Atlantic slope the Rocky Mountain region and the southern portion of the Mississippi Valley are well wooded they are here stretches of hundreds and thousands of miles where either not a tree grows or often useless destruction has prevailed and the matter of the cultivation and spread of forests may well be pressed upon thinkers who look to the coming generations of the prairie states Mississippi Valley literature lying by one rainy day in Missouri to rest after quite a long exploration first trying a big volume I found there as Milton Young Gray Beatty and Collins but giving it up for a bad job enjoying however for a while as often before the reading of Walter Scott's poems lay at the last minstrel mimeon and so on I stopped and lay down the book and pondered the thought of the poetry that should in due time express and supply the teaming region I was in the midst of and have briefly touched upon one's mind needs but a moment's deliberation anywhere in the United States to see clearly enough that all the prevalent book and library poets either is imported from Great Britain or followed and docile gang here are foreign to our states copiously as they are read by us all but to fully understand not only how absolutely in opposition to our times and lands and how little and cramped and what anachorisms and absurdities many of their pages are for American purposes one must dwell or travel away in Missouri Kansas and Colorado and get rapport with their people and country will the day ever come no matter how long deferred when those models and lay figures from the British Islands and even the precious traditions of the classics will be reminisces studies only the pure breath primitiveness boundless prodigality and amplitude strange mixture of delicacy and power of continents of real and ideal and of all original and first-class elements of these prairies the Rocky Mountains and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers will they ever appearing and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art I sometimes think that even the ambition of my friend Joaquin Miller to put them in and illustrate them places him ahead of the whole crowd not long ago I was down New York Bay on a steamer watching the sunset over the dark green heights of NAVSIG and viewing all that inimitable spread of shore shipping and sea around Sandy Hook but an intervening week or two and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of the Spanish peaks in the more than 2000 miles between though of infinite and paradoxical variety a curious and absolute fusion is doubtless steadily annealing compacting identifying all but subtle and wider and more solid to produce such compaction than the laws of the states or the common ground of Congress or the Supreme Court or the steel ties of railroads or all the needing and fusing processes of our material and business history past or present will in my opinion be a great throwing vital imaginative work or series of works or literature in constructing which the plains the prairies and the Mississippi River with the domestic of its varied and ample valley should be the concrete background and America's humanity passions struggles hopes there are now and a clear system as it is and is to be on the stage of the new world of all times he the two drama of war romance and evolution should furnish the land and fire the ideal and interviewers item October 17 79 today one of the newspapers of st. Louis prints the following informal remarks of mine on American especially Western literature we call on Mr. Whitman yesterday and after a somewhat desultory conversation abruptly asking do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature it seems to me said he that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in products in agriculture in commerce in networks of intercommunication and in all that relates to the comforts of vast masses of men and families with freedom of speech ecclesiasticism etc these we have founded and are carrying out on a grander scale than ever hitherto an Ohio Illinois Indiana Missouri Kansas and Colorado seem to me to be the seat and field of these very facts and ideas materialistic prosperity in all its very forms with those other points that I mentioned intercommunication and freedom are first to be attended to when those have their results and get settled then a literature worthy of us will begin to be defined our American superiority and vitality are in the bulk of our people not in a gentry like the old will the greatest of our army during the secession war was in the rank and file and so with the nation other lands have their vitality in a few a class but we have it in the bulk of the people our leading men are not of much account and never have been but the average of the people is immense beyond all history sometimes I think in all departments literature and art included that will be the way as superiority will exhibit itself we will not have great individuals or great leaders but a great average fall unprecedentedly great the women of the West Kansas City I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the women of the prairie cities I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main Street Kansas City a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by the ladies and the same in Denver are all fashionably dressed and have the look of gentility in face manner and action but they do not have physique or the mentality appropriate to them any high native originality of spirit or body as the men certainly have appropriate to them they are intellectual and fashionable but disceptic looking and generally don't lie their ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters something far different and in advance must appear to tell me and complete the superb masculinity of the West and maintain and continue it end up section 14 chapter 15 of specimen days this is a Libra box recording all Libra box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libra box org specimen days by Walt Whitman chapter 15 the silent general September 28 1879 so general grant after circumambulating the world has arrived home again landed in San Francisco yesterday from the ship city of Tokyo from Japan what a man he is what a history what an illustration his life of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all cynical critics are wondering what the people can see in grant to make such a hubbub about they have ear and it is no doubt true that he has hardly the average of our days literary and scholastic culture and absolutely no pronounced genius or conventional eminence of any sort correct but he proves how the average Western farmer mechanic Boatman carried by tides of circumstances perhaps caprices into position of incredible military or civic responsibilities history has presented none more trying no born monarchs no mark more shining for attack or envy may steer his way vitally and steadily through the mall carrying the country and himself with credit year after year command over a million armed men fight more than fifty pitched battles rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined and then retiring quietly with his agar in his mouth make the promenade of the whole world through its courts and coteries and kings and czars and micatos and splendidest glitters and etiquettes as flammatically as he ever walked the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner I say all this is what people like and I am sure I like it seems to me it transcends Plutarch how those old Greeks indeed would have seized on him a mere plain man no art no poetry only practical sense ability to do or try his best to do what devolved upon him a common trader moneymaker Tanner farmer of Illinois general for the republic in its terrific struggle with itself in the war of attempted succession president following a task of peace more difficult than the war itself nothing heroic as the authorities put it and yet the greatest hero the gods the destinies seem to have concentrated upon him president hazes speeches September 30 I see president hazes come out west passing quite informally from point to point with his wife in a small cortege of big officers receiving ovations in making daily and sometimes double daily addresses to the people to these addresses all impromptu and some would call them ephemeral I feel to devote a memorandum they are shrewd good-natured face to face speeches on easy topics not too deep but they give me some revised ideas of oratory of a new opportune theory in practice of that art quite changed from the classic rules and adapted to our days our occasions to American democracy and to the swarming populations of the West I hear them criticized as wanting indignity but to me they are just what they should be considering all the circumstances who they come from and who they are addressed to underneath his objects are to compact and fraternize the states encourage their materialistic and industrial development soothe and expand their self-poise and tie all and each with restless double ties not only of inter-trade barter but of human comradeship from Kansas City I went on to St. Louis where I remained nearly three months with my brother TJW and my dear nieces St. Louis memoranda October November and December 1879 the points of St. Louis are its position its absolute wealth the long accumulations of time and trade solid riches probably a higher average thereof than any city the unrivaled amplitude of its well laid out environment edge of broad plateaus for future expansion and the great state of which it is the head it fuses northern and southern qualities perhaps native and foreign ones to perfection rendezvous the whole stretch of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and its American electricity goes well with its German phlegm fourth fifth and third streets are store streets showy modern metropolitan with hurrying crowds vehicles horse cars hubbub plenty of people rich goods plate glass windows iron fronts often five or six stories high you can purchase anything in St. Louis in most of the big Western cities for that matter of that just as readily and cheaply as in the Atlantic March's often in going about the town you see reminders of old even decayed civilization the water of the West in some places is not good but they make it up here by plenty of very fair wine and inexhaustible quantities of the best beer in the world there are immense establishments for slaughtering beef and pork and I saw flocks of sheep five thousand in a flock in Kansas City I had visited a packing establishment that kills and packs an average of twenty five hundred hogs a day the whole year round for export another in Atchison Kansas same extent others nearly equal elsewhere and just as big ones here nights on the Mississippi October 29th 30th and 31st wonderfully fine with the full harvest moon dazzling and silvery I have haunted the river every night lately where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight it is indeed a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable and I never tire of it the river at present is very low I notice today it had much more of a blue clear look than usual I hear the slight ripples the air is fresh and cool and the view up or down wonderfully clear in the moonlight I am out pretty late it is so fascinating dreamy the cool night air all the influences the silence with those far off eternal stars do me good I have been quite ill of late and so well near the center of our national demeson these night views of the Mississippi upon our own land always after supper take a walk half a mile long says an old proverb dryly adding and if convenient let it be upon your own land I wonder does any other nation but ours afford opportunity for such a jaunt as this indeed has any previous period afforded it no one I discover begins to know the real geographic democratic and indissoluble American Union is the present or suspected in the future until he explores these central states and dwells a while observantly on their prairies or amid their busy towns and the mighty father of waters a ride of two or three thousand miles on one's own land with hardly a disconnection could certainly be had in no other place than the United States and at no period before this if you want to see what the railroad is and how civilization and progress date from it how it is the conqueror of crude nature which it turns to man's use both on small scales and on the largest come hither to inland America I returned home East January five eighteen eighty having traversed to and fro and across ten thousand miles and more I soon resumed my seclusions down in the woods or by the creek or gaddings about cities and an occasional disposition will be seen from the following Edgar Poe's significance January one eighteen eighty in diagnosing this disease called humanity to assume for the nonce what seems a chief mood of the personality and writings of my subject I have thought that poets somewhere or other on the list present the most market indications comprehending artists in a mass musicians painters actors and so on and considering each and all of them is radiations or flanges of that furious whirling wheel poetry the center and axis of the whole where else indeed may we so well investigate the causes growths tally marks of the time the ages matter and malady by common consent there is nothing better for man or woman than a perfect and noble life morally without flaw happily balanced in activity physically sound and pure giving its due proportion and no more to the sympathetic the human emotional element a life in all these unhasting unresting untiring to the end and yet there is another shape of personality dear or far to the artist sense which likes the play of strongest lights and shades where the perfect character the good the heroic although never attained is never lost side of but through failures sorrows temporary downfalls is returned to again and again and while often violated is passionately adhere to as long as mind muscles voice obey the power we call volition this sort of personality we see more or less in burns Byron Schiller and George sand but we do not see it in Edgar poll all this is the result of reading in intervals the last three days a new volume of his poems I took it on my rambles down by the pond and by degrees read it all through there while to the character first outlined to the service poll renders is certainly that entire contrast and contradiction which is next best to fully exemplifying it almost without the first sign of moral principle or of the concrete or its heroisms or the simpler affections of the heart pose versus illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty with the rhyming art to excess and incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes a demonic undertone behind every page and by final judgment probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature brilliant and dazzling but with no heat there is an indescribable magnetism about the poet's life and reminiscences as well as the poems to one who could work out their subtle retracing and retrospect the latter would make a close tally no doubt between the author's birth and antecedents his childhood and youth his physique his so called education his studies and associates the literary and social Baltimore Richmond Philadelphia and New York of those times not only the places and circumstances and themselves but often very often in a strange burning of and reaction from the mall the following from a report in the Washington star of November 16 1875 may afford those who care for it something further of my point of view toward this interesting figure and influence of our era there occurred about that date in Baltimore a public reburial of pose remains and a dedication of a monument over the grave being in Washington on a visit at the time the old gray went over to Baltimore and though ill from paralysis consented to hobble up and silently take a seat on the platform but refused to make any speech saying I have felt a strong impulse to come over and be here today myself in memory of Poe which I have obeyed but not the slightest impulse to make a speech which my dear friends must also be a debate in an informal circle however in conversation after the ceremonies Whitman said for a long while and until lately I had a distaste for pose writings I wanted and still want for poetry the clear sun shining and fresh air blowing the strength and power of health not of delirium even amid the stormiest passions with always the background of the eternal moralities non complying with these requirements pose genius has yet conquered a special recognition for itself and I too have come to fully admit it and appreciate it and him in a dream I once had I saw a vessel on the sea at midnight in a storm it was no grateful rigged ship nor majestic steamer steering firmly through the gale but seemed one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchored rocking so jauntily in the waters around New York or up on Long Island sound now flying uncontrolled with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night on the deck was a slender slight beautiful figure a dim man apparently enjoying all the terror the Merc and the dislocation of which he was the center and the victim that figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe his spirit his fortunes and his poems themselves all lurid dreams much more baby said but I most desired to exploit the idea put at the beginning by its popular poets the calibers of an age the weak spots of its embankments its subcurrents often more significant than the biggest surface ones are unerringly indicated the lush and the weird that have taken such extraordinary possession of 19th century verse lovers what mean they the inevitable tendency of poetic culture to morbidity abnormal beauty the sickliness of all technical thought or refinement in itself the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand the body the earth and sea sex and the like and the substitution of something for them at second or third hand what bearings have they on current pathological study Beethoven's septet February 11 1880 at a good concert tonight in the foyer of the opera house Philadelphia the band a small but first rate one never did music more sink into and soothe and fill me never so prove its sole rousing power its impossibility of statement especially in the rendering of one of Beethoven's master septets by the well-chosen and perfectly combined instruments violins viola clarionette horn cello and contra base I was carried away seeing absorbing many wonders dainty abandons sometimes as if nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine serious and firm monotonies as of winds a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest and the dying echoes soothing floating of waves but presently rising in surges angrily lashing muttering heavy piercing peels of laughter for interstices now and then weird as nature herself is in certain moods but mainly spontaneous easy careless often the sentiment of the postures of naked children playing or sleeping it did me good even to watch the violinist drawing their bows so masterly even motion a study I allowed myself as I sometimes do to wander out of myself the conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds and in their midst a simple harmonic duo two human souls steadily asserting their own pensiveness joyousness a hint of wild nature February 13 as I was crossing the Delaware today I saw a large flock of wild geese right overhead not very high up ranged in V shape and relief against the noon clouds of light smoke color had a capital though momentary view of them and even then of their course on and on southeast till gradually fading my eyesight yet first rate for the open air in its distances but I use glasses for reading queer thoughts melted into me in the two or three minutes or less seeing these creatures cleaving the sky the spacious airy realm even the prevailing smoke gray color everywhere no sun shining the waters below the rapid flight of the birds appearing just for a minute flashing to me such a hint of the whole spread of nature with her eternal unsophisticated freshness her never visited recesses of sky sea and shore and then disappearing in the distance loafing in the woods March 8 I write this down in the country again but in a new spot seated on a log in the woods warm sunny midday have been loafing here among the deep trees shafts of tall pines oak hickory with a thick undergrowth of laurels and grapevines the ground covered everywhere by debris dead leaves breakage moss everything solitary ancient grim paths such as they are leading hither and yawn how made I know not for nobody seems to come here nor man nor cattle kind temperature today about 60 the wind through the pine tops I sit and listen to its horse sighing above and to the stillness long and long varied by aimless rambles in the old roads and paths and by exercise pulls at the young saplings to keep my joints from getting stiff bluebirds robins metal arcs begin to appear next day ninth a snowstorm in the morning and continuing most of the day but I took a walk over two hours the same woods and paths amid the falling flakes no wind yet the musical low murmur through the pines quite pronounced curious like waterfalls now stilled now pouring again all the senses sight sound smell delicately gratified every snowflake lay where it fell on the evergreens holly trees laurels et cetera the multitude in his leaves and branches piled bulging white defined by edge lines of emerald the tall straight columns of the plentiful bronze topped pines a slight resonance odor blending with that of the snow for there is a scent to everything even the snow if you can only detect it no two places hardly any two hours anywhere exactly alike how different the odor of noon from midnight or winter from summer or a windy spell from a still one a control to voice may nine Sunday visit this evening to my friends the jays good supper to which I did justice lively chat with Mrs. J. and I and J. As I sat out front on the walk long afterward in the evening air the church choir and organ on the opposite corner gave Luther's hymn I infested very very finally the air was born by a rich contralto for nearly half an hour there in the dark there was a good string of English stanzas came the music firm and unhurried with long pauses the full silver star beams of lira rose silently over the church's dim roof ridge very colored lights from the stained glass windows broke through the tree shadows and under all under the northern crown of there and in the fresh breeze below and the churro screw of the night that liquid full contralto seeing Niagara to advantage June for 1880 for really seizing a great picture or book or piece of music or architecture or grand scenery or perhaps for the first time even the common sunshine or landscape or maybe even the mystery of identity most curious mystery of all there comes some lucky five minutes of a man's life set amid a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances and bringing in a brief flash the combination of years of reading and travel and thought the present case about two o'clock this afternoon gave me Niagara it's superb severity of action and color and majestic grouping in one short indescribable show we were very slowly crossing the suspension bridge not a full stop anywhere but next to it the day clear sunny still and I out on the platform the falls were in plain view about a mile off but very distinct and no roar hardly a murmur the river tumbling green and white far below me the dark high banks the plentiful umbrage many bronze cedars in shadow and tempering and arching all the immense materiality a clear sky overhead with a few white clouds limpid spiritual silent brief and as quiet as brief that picture of resemblance afterwards such are the things indeed I lay away with my life's rare and blessed bits of hours reminiscent past the wild sea storm I once saw one winter day off fire island the elder booth in Richard that famous night forty years ago in the old Bowery or albony in the children seen in Norma or night views I remember on the field after battles in Virginia or the peculiar sentiment of moonlight and stars over the great plains western Kansas or scooting up New York Bay with a stiff breeze and a good yacht off Navasink with these I say I henceforth place that view that afternoon that combination complete that five minutes perfect absorption of Niagara not the great majestic gem alone by itself but set complete in all its varied full indispensable surroundings end of chapter 15 chapter 16 of specimen days this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org specimen days by Walt Whitman chapter 16 jaunting to Canada to go back a little I left Philadelphia ninth and green streets at eight o'clock p.m. June 3rd on a first class sleeper by the Leahy Valley north Pennsylvania route through Bethlehem Wilkes Bear Waverly and so by Erie on through Corning to Hornellsville where we arrived at eight morning and had a bounteous breakfast I must say I never put in such a good night on any railroad track smooth firm the minimum of jolting and all the swiftness compatible with safety so without change to Buffalo and thence to Clifton where we arrived early afternoon then on to London Ontario Canada in four more less than 22 hours altogether I am domiciled at the hospitable house of my friend's doctor and Mrs. Buck in the ample and charming garden and lawns of the asylum Sunday with the insane June 6th went over to the religious services Episcopal main insane asylum held in a lofty good-sized hall third story plain boards whitewash plenty of cheap chairs no ornament or color yet all scrupulously clean and sweet some 300 persons present mostly patients everything the prayers short sermon the firm or a ton voice of the minister and most of all beyond any portraying or suggesting that audience deeply impressed me I was furnished with an armchair near the pulpit and sat facing the motley yet perfectly well behaved and orderly congregation the quaint dresses and bonnets of some of the women several very old and gray here and there like the heads and old pictures oh the looks that came from those spaces there were two or three I shall probably never forget nothing at all markedly repulsive or hideous strange enough I did not see one such our common humanity mine and yours everywhere the same old blood the same red running blood yet behind most an inferred area of such storms such wrecks such mysteries fires love wrong greed for wealth religious problems crossed mirrored from those crazed faces yet now temporarily so calm like still waters all the woes and sad happenings of life and death now from every one the devotional element radiating was it not indeed the peace of God that passeth all understanding strange as it may sound I can only say that I took long and searching I sweeps as I sat there and it seemed so rousing unprecedented thoughts problems unanswerable a very fair choir and a melodian accompaniment they sang lead kindly light after the sermon many joined in the beautiful him to which the minister read the introductory text in the daytime also he led them with a cloud and all the night with a light of fire then the words lead kindly light amid the circling gloom lead thou me on the night is dark and I'm far from home lead thou me on keep thou my feet I do not ask to see the distant scene one step enough for me I was not ever thus nor prayed that thou should leave me on I love to choose and see my path but now lead thou me on I love to the garish day and spite of fears pride ruled my will remember not past years a couple of days after I went to the refractory building under special charge of Dr. Beamer and through the wards pretty thoroughly both the men's and women's I've since made many other visits of the kind through the asylum and around among the detached cottages as far as I could see this is among the most advanced perfected and kindly and rationally carried on of all its kind in america it is a town in itself with many buildings and a thousand inhabitants I learned that Canada and especially this ample and populous province Ontario has the very best and plenteous benevolent institutions in all departments reminiscence of Elias Hicks June 8th today a letter from Mrs. Esl Detroit accompanied in a little post office role by a rare old engraved head of Elias Hicks from a portrait in oil by Henry Inman painted for JVS must have been 60 years or more ago in New York among the rest the following excerpt about EH in the letter I've listened to his preaching so often when a child and sat with my mother at social gatherings where he was at the centre and everyone so pleased and stirred by his conversation I hear that you contemplate writing or speaking about him and I wondered whether you had a picture of him as I am the owner of two I send you one grand native growth in a few days I go to Lake Huron and may have something to say of that region and people from what I already see I should say the young native population of Canada was growing up forming a hearty democratic intelligent radically sound and just as American good-natured and individualistic race as the average range of best specimens among us as among us too I please myself by considering that this element though it may not be the majority promises to be the leaven which must eventually leaven the whole lump a zolverine between the US and Canada some of the more liberal of the presses here are discussing the question of a zolverine between the United States and Canada it is proposed to form a union for commercial purposes to altogether abolish the frontier tariff line with its double sets of custom house officials now existing between the two countries and to agree upon one tariff for both the proceeds of this tariff to be divided between the two governments on the basis of population it is said that a large proportion of the merchants of Canada are in favour of this step as they believe it would materially add to the business of the country by removing the restrictions that now exist on trade between Canada and the United States those persons who are opposed to the measure believe that it would increase the material welfare of the country but it would loosen the bonds between Canada and England and this sentiment overrides the desire for commercial prosperity whether the sentiment can continue to bear the strain put upon it is a question it is thought by many that commercial considerations must in the end prevail it seems also to be generally agreed that such a zolverine or common customs union would bring practically more benefits to the Canadian provinces than to the United States it seems to me a certainty of time sooner or later that Canada shall form two or three grand states equal and independent with the rest of the American Union the St. Lawrence and lakes are not a frontier line but a grand interior or a mid channel the St. Lawrence line August 20th promising that my three or four months in Canada were intended among the rest as an exploration of the line of the St. Lawrence from Lake Superior to the sea the engineers here insist upon considering it as one stream over 2,000 miles long including lakes and Niagara and all that I've only partially carried out my program but for the seven or 800 miles so far fulfilled I find that the Canada question is absolutely controlled by this vast waterline with its first class features and points of trade humanity and many more here I am writing this nearly a thousand miles north of my Philadelphia starting point by way of Montreal and Quebec in the midst of regions that go to a further extreme of grimness wildness of beauty and a sort of still and pagan scarredness well yet Christian inhabitable and partially fertile than perhaps any other on earth the weather remains perfect some might call it a little cool but I wear my old gray overcoat and find it just right the days are full of sunbeams and oxygen most of the forenoons and afternoons I'm on the forward deck of the steamer the savage Saginae up these black waters over a hundred miles always strong deep hundreds of feet sometimes thousands ever with high rocky hills for banks green and gray at times a little like some parts of the Hudson but much more pronounced and defiant the hills rise higher keeping their ranks more unbroken the river is straighter and of more resolute flow and it's huge darkest ink exquisitely polished and sheenie under the august sun different indeed this Saginae from all other rivers different effects a bolder more vehement play of lights and shades of a rare charm of singleness and simplicity like the organ chant at midnight from the old Spanish convent in favorita one strain only simple and monotonous and unornamented but indescribably penetrating and grand and masterful great place for echoes while our steamer was tied at the wharf at Tajsac waiting the escape pipe let off steam and I was sure I heard a band at the hotel up in the rocks could even make out some of the tunes only when our pipe stopped I knew what caused it then at Cape Eternity and Trinity Rock the pilot with his whistle producing similar marvelous results echoes indescribably weird as we lay off in the still bay under their shadows Cape's eternity and trinity but the great haughty silent capes themselves I doubt if any crack points or hills or historic places of note or anything of the kind elsewhere in the world outvise these objects I write while I am before them face to face they're very simple they do not startle at least they did not me but they linger in one's memory forever they're placed very near each other side by side each a mountain rising flush out of the Saginae a good thrower could throw a stone on each and passing at least it seems so then they are as distinct in form as a perfect physical man or a perfect physical woman Cape Eternity is bare rising as just said sheer out of the water rugged and grim yet with an indescribable beauty nearly two thousand feet high Trinity Rock even a little higher also rising flesh top rounded like a great head with close cut verger of hair I consider myself well repaid for coming my thousand miles to get the sight and memory of the unrivaled duo they have stirred me more profoundly than anything of the kind I have yet seen if Europe or Asia had them we should certainly hear of them in all sorts of sent back poems rhapsodies et cetera a dozen times a year through our papers and magazines Shikudami and Ha Ha Bay no indeed life and travel and memory have offered and will preserve to me no deeper cut incidents panorama or sights to cheer my soul than these at Shikudami and Ha Ha Bay and my days and nights up and down this fascinating savage river the rounded mountains some bear and gray some dull red some draped close all over with matted green verdure or vines the ample calm eternal rocks everywhere the long streaks of motley foam a milk white curd on the glistening breast of the stream the little two masted schooner dingy yellow patched sails set wing and wing nearing us coming saucily up the water with a couple of swarly black haired men aboard the strong shades falling on the light gray or yellow outlines of the hills all through the forenoon as we steam within gunshot of them well ever the pure and delicate sky spreads over all and the splendid sunsets and the sights of evening the same old stars relatively a little different I see so far north archer is an lira and the eagle and great Jupiter like a silver globe and the constellation of the scorpion then northern lights near the every night the inhabitants good living graham and rocky and blackwatered as the demesna here about is however you must not think genial humanity and comfort and good living are not to be met before I began this memorandum I made a first-rate breakfast of sea trout finishing off with wild raspberries I find smiles and courtesy everywhere physiognomies in general curiously like those in the United States I was astonished to find the same resemblance all through the province of Quebec in general the inhabitants of this rugged country charlevoix chicoutoumi and tajusac counties and lakesate jaune region a simple hearty population lumbering trapping furs boating fishing berry picking and a little farming I was watching a group of young boatmen eating their early dinner nothing but an immense loaf of bread had apparently been the size of a bushel measure from which they cut chunks with a jackknife must be a tremendous winter country this when the solid frost and ice fully set in cedar plums like names back again in Camden and down in jersey one time I thought of naming this collection cedar plums like which I still fancy wouldn't have been a bad name nor inappropriate a melange of loafing looking hobbling sitting traveling a little thinking thrown in for salt but very little not only summer but all seasons not only days but nights some literary meditations books authors examined carlyle poe emerson tried always under my cedar tree in the open air and never in the library mostly the scenes everybody sees but some of my own caprices meditations egotism truly an open air and mainly summer formation singly or in clusters wild and free and somewhat acrid indeed more like cedar plums than you might guess at first glance but you know what they are to a city man or some sweet parlor lady I now talk as you go along roads or barons or cross country anywhere through these states middle eastern western or southern you will see certain seasons of the year the thick woolly tufts of the cedar modeled with bunches of china blue berries about as big as fox grapes but first a special word for the tree itself everybody knows that the cedar is a healthy cheap democratic wood streaked red and white and evergreen that is not a cultivated tree that it keeps away moths that it grows inland or seaboard all climates hot or cold any soil in fact rather prefers sand and bleak spots content if the plow the fertilizer in the trimming acts will but keep away and let it alone after a long rain when everything looks bright often I have stopped in my wood saunters south or north or far west to take in its dusky green washed clean and sweet inspect copiously with its fruit of clear hearty blue the wood of this eater is of use but what profit on earth are the sprigs of those acrid plums a question impossible to answer satisfactorily true some of the herb doctors give them for stomach affections but the remedy is as bad as the disease then in my rambles down in camden county I once found a crazy old woman gathering the clusters with zeal and joy she showed as I was told afterward sort of infatuation for them and every year placed and kept profuse bunches high and low about her room they had a strange charm on her uneasy head and affected docility and peace she was harmless and lived nearby with her well-off married daughter whether there is any connection between those bunches and being out of one's wits I cannot say but I myself entertain a weakness for them indeed I love the cedar anyhow it's naked ruggedness it's just palpable odor so different from the perfumer's best it's silence it's equitable acceptance of winter's cold and summer's heat of rain or drought it's shelter to me from those at times it's associations well I never could explain why I love anybody or anything the service I now specially owe to the cedar is that well I cast around for a name for my proposed collection hesitating puzzled after rejecting a long long string I lift my eyes and low the very term I want at any rate I go no further I tire in the search I take what some invisible kind spirit has put before me besides who shall say there is not affinity enough between at least the bundle of sticks that produced many of these pieces or granulations and those blueberries their uselessness growing wild a certain aroma of nature I would so like to have in my pages the thin soil once they come they're content in being let alone they're stolid and deaf for puggins to answering questions this latter the nearest dearest trade affinity of all then reader deer in conclusion as to the point of the name for the present collection let us be satisfied to have a name something to identify and bind together to concrete all its vegetable mineral personal memoranda abrupt raids of criticism crude gossip of philosophy varied sands and clumps without bothering ourselves because certain pages do not present themselves to you or me as coming under their own name with entire fitness or amiability it is a profound vexatious never explicable matter this of names I've been exercised deeply about it my whole life note 11 in the pocket of my receptacle book I find a list of suggested and rejected names for this volume or parts of it such as the following as the wild bee hums in may and august molines grow and winter snowflakes fall and stars in the sky roll around away from books away from art now for the day and night the lessons done now for the sun and stars notes of a half paralytic as voices in the dusk from week in and week out speakers far or hid embers of ending days autophones embryons ducks and drakes wing and wing flood tide and ebb notes and recalls gossip at early candlelight only mullings and bumblebees echoes and escapades pond babble tera tets such as I evening dues echoes of a life in the 19th century in the new world notes and writing a book far and near at 63 flanges of 50 years drifts and cumulus abandons hurry notes maze tassels kindlings a life mosaic native moments four and aft vestibules types and semitones cintilla at 60 and after odd mints sand drifts sands on the shores of 64 again and again after all of which the name cedar plums like got its nose put out of joint but I cannot afford to throw away what I penciled down the lane there under the shelter of my old friend one warm october noon besides it wouldn't be civil to the cedar tree death of thomas carlough february 10th 81 and so the flame of the lamp after long wasting and flickering has gone out entirely as a representative author a literary figure no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era its fierce paradoxes its din and its struggling parturition periods than carlough he belongs to our own branch of the stock too neither latin nor greek but altogether gothic rugged mountainous volcanic he was himself more a french revolution than any of his volumes in some respects so far in the 19th century the best equipped keenest mind even from the college point of view of all britain only he had an ailing body dyspepsia is to be traced in every page and now and then fills the page one may include among the lessons of his life even though that life stretched to amazing length how behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach and gives a sort of casting vote two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the man sometimes pulling him in different ways like wild horses he was a cautious conservative scotchman fully aware what a fetid gas bag much of modern radicalism is but then his great heart demanded reform demanded change often terribly at odds with his scornful brain no author ever put so much wailing and despair into his books sometimes palpable often are latent he reminds me of that passage in young's poems whereas death presses closer and closer for his pray the soul rushes hither and thither appealing shrieking berating to escape the general doom of shortcomings even positive blur spots from an american point of view he had serious share not for his merely literary merit though that was great not as maker of books but as launching into the self complacent atmosphere of our days a rasping questioning dislocating agitation and shock is carlile's final value it is time the english-speaking people's had some true idea about the vertebra of genius namely power as if they must always have it cut and biased to the fashion like a lady's cloak what a needed service he performs how he shakes our comfortable reading circles with a touch of the old hebraic anger and prophecy and indeed it is just the same not isaia himself more scornful more threatening the crown of pride the drunkards of ifram shall be trodden under feet and the glorious beauty which is on the head of the fat valley shall be a fading flower the word prophecy is much misused seems narrowed to prediction merely that is not the main sense of the hebra word translated profit it means one whose mind bubbles up and pours forth as a fountain from inner divine spontaneities revealing god prediction is a very minor part of prophecy the great matter is to reveal an outpour the godlike suggestions pressing for birth in the soul this is briefly the doctrine of the friends or quakers then simplicity and amid ostensible frailty the towering strength of this man a hearty oak knot you could never wear out an old farmer dressed in brown clothes and not handsome his very foibles fascinating who cares that he wrote about dr. frankia and shooting niagara and the nigger question and didn't at all admire our united states and doubt if he ever thought or said half as bad words about us as we deserve how he splashes like leviathan in the seas of modern literature and politics doubtless respecting the latter one needs first to realize from actual observation the squalor vise and doggedness and grained in the bulk population of the british islands with the red tape the fatuity the flunkyism everywhere to understand the last meaning of his pages accordingly though he was no chartist or radical i consider carliles by far the most indignant comment or protest and at the fruits of feudalism today in great britain the increasing poverty and degradation of the homeless landless 20 millions while a few thousands or rather a few hundreds possessed the entire soil the money and the fat births trade and shipping and clubs and culture and prestige and guns and a fine select class of gentry and aristocracy with every modern improvement cannot begin to salve or defend such stupendous hoggishness the way to test how much he has left this country were to consider or try to consider for a moment the array of british thought the resultant ensemble of the last 50 years as existing today but with carlile left out it would be like the army with no artillery the show were still a gay and rich one byron scott tenison and many more horsemen and rapid infantry and banners flying but the last heavy roar so dear to the ear of the trained soldier and that settles fate and victory would be lacking for the last three years we in america have had transmitted glimpses of thin-bodied lonesome wifeless childless very old man lying on a sofa kept out of bed by indomitable will but of late never well enough to take the open air i've noted this news from time to time in brief descriptions in the papers a week ago i read such an item just before i started out for my customary evening stroll between eight and nine in the fine cold night unusually clear february 5th 81 as i walked some open grounds adjacent the condition of carlile and his approaching perhaps even then actual death filled me with thoughts eluding statement and curiously blending with the scene the planet venus an hour high in the west with all her volume and lester recovered she has been shorn in languid for nearly a year including an additional sentiment i have never noticed before not merely voluptuous papian steeping fascinating now with calm commanding seriousness and hoture the milo venus now upward to the zenith jupiter saturn and the moon past her quarter trailing in procession with pleiades following and the constellation torus and rel'd al dabbaren not a cloud in heaven orion strode through the southeast with his glittering belt and a trifle below hung the sun of the night serious every star dilated more vitrious near than usual not as in some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible and just as nigh bernice's hair showing every gem and new ones to the northeast and north the sickle the golden kids cassiopeia caster and pollocks and the two dippers well through the whole of this silent indescribable show enclosing and bathing my whole receptivity ran the thought of carlile dying to soothe and spiritualize and far as may be solve the mysteries of death and genius consider them under the stars at midnight and now that he has gone hence can it be that thomas carlile soon to chemically dissolve in ashes and by winds remains an identity still in ways perhaps eluding all the statements lore and speculations of 10 thousand years eluding all possible statements to immortal sense does he yet exist a definite vital being a spirit an individual perhaps now often in space among those stellar systems which suggestive and limitless as they are merely edge more limitless far more suggestive systems i have no doubt of it in silence of a fine night such questions are answered to the soul the best answers that can be given with me too when depressed by some specially sad event or tearing problem i wait till i go out under the stars for the last voiceless satisfaction end of section 16