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Prose and Verse of Walt Whitman.

Few are aware how the great Literature penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes at will.

Others adorn the past—but you, O days of the present I adorn you! O days of the future, I believe in you! I isolate myself for your sake! O America, because you build f'r​ mankind, I b'ildf'r​ you!

To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no account; That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle, as the hold of the limbs of the body, or the fibres of plants. Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. (Soul of love, and tongue of fire! Eye to pierce the deepest deeps, and sweep the world; —Ah mother! prolific and full in all besides—yet how long barren, barren?)

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble; I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon; I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades.

I DREAM'D​ in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the wholeof the rest of the earth; I dream'd​ that was the new City of Friends. Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest; It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.

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