When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements,
When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the proud roar love,
When the round-mouth’d guns out of the smoke and smell I love
    spit their salutes,
When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me, and
    heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin haze,
When gorgeous the countless straight stems, the forests at the
    wharves, thicken with colors,
When every ship richly drest carries her flag at the peak,
When pennants trail and street-festoons hang from the windows,
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and
    foot-standers, when the mass is densest,
When the facades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes
    gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time,
When the guests from the islands advance, when the pageant moves
    forward visible,
When the summons is made, when the answer that waited thousands
    of years answers,
I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the
    crowd, and gaze with them.

     2
Superb-faced Manhattan! 
Comrade Americanos! to us, then at last the Orient comes. 
To us, my city,
Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite
    sides, to walk in the space between,
To-day our Antipodes comes.

The Originatress comes,
The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of eld,
Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with passion,
Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering eyes,
The race of Brahma comes.

See my cantabile! these and more are flashing to us from the procession,
As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine it moves changing before us.

For not the envoys nor the tann’d Japanee from his island only,
Lithe and silent the Hindoo appears, the Asiatic continent itself
    appears, the past, the dead,
The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable,
The envelop’d mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,
The north, the sweltering south, eastern Assyria, the Hebrews, the
    ancient of ancients,
Vast desolated cities, the gliding present, all of these and more
    are in the pageant-procession.

Geography, the world, is in it,
The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond,
The coast you henceforth are facing—­you Libertad! from your Western
    golden shores,
The countries there with their populations, the millions en-masse
    are curiously here,
The swarming market-places, the temples with idols ranged along the
    sides or at the end, bonze, brahmin, and llama,
Mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman,
The singing-girl and the dancing-girl, the ecstatic persons, the
    secluded emperors,
Confucius himself, the great poets and heroes, the