LEAVES OF GRASS (The Original 1855 Edition & The 1892 Death Bed Edition). Walt Whitman

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СКАЧАТЬ projected masculine full-sized and golden.

      All truths wait in all things,

       They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

       They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

       The insignificant is as big to me as any,

       What is less or more than a touch?

      Logic and sermons never convince,

       The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

      Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,

       Only what nobody denies is so.

      A minute and a drop of me settle my brain;

       I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,

       And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,

       And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,

      And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,

       And until every one shall delight us, and we them.

      I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,

       And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

       And the tree-toad is a chef-d’ouvre for the highest,

       And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

       And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

       And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue,

       And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,

       And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking shortcake.

      I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,

       And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,

       And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,

       And call any thing close again when I desire it.

      In vain the speeding or shyness,

       In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,

       In vain the mastadon retreats beneath its own powdered bones,

       In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,

       In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,

       In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,

       In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,

       In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,

       In vain the razorbilled auk sails far north to Labrador,

      I follow quickly . . . . I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

      I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals . . . . they are so placid and self-contained,

       I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.

      They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

       They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

       They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

       Not one is dissatisfied . . . . not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

       Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

       Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

      So they show their relations to me and I accept them;

       They bring me tokens of myself . . . . they evince them plainly in their possession.

      I do not know where they got those tokens,

       I must have passed that way untold times ago and negligently dropt them,

       Myself moving forward then and now and forever,

       Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,

       Infinite and omnigenous and the like of these among them;

       Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,

       Picking out here one that shall be my amie,

       Choosing to go with him on brotherly terms.

      A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,

       Head high in the forehead and wide between the ears,

       Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,

       Eyes well apart and full of sparkling wickedness . . . . ears finely cut and flexibly moving.

      His nostrils dilate . . . . my heels embrace him . . . . his well built limbs tremble with pleasure . . . . we speed around and return.

      I but use you a moment and then I resign you stallion . . . . and do not need your paces, and outgallop them,

       And myself as I stand or sit pass faster than you.

      Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;

       What I guessed when I loafed on the grass,

       What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed . . . . and again as I walked the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

      My ties and ballasts leave me . . . . I travel . . . . I sail . . . . my elbows rest in the sea-gaps,

       I skirt the sierras . . . . my palms cover continents,

       I am afoot with my vision.

      By the city’s quadrangular houses . . . . in log-huts, or camping with lumbermen,

       Along the ruts of the turnpike . . . . along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,

       Hoeing my onion-patch, and rows of carrots and parsnips . . . . crossing savannas . . . trailing in forests,

       Prospecting . . . . gold-digging . . . . girdling the trees of a new purchase,

       Scorched ankle-deep by the hot sand . . . . hauling my boat down the shallow river;

       Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead . . . . where the buck turns furiously at the hunter,

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