} Unnamed Land

Nations ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten
    thousand years before these States,
Garner’d clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and
    travel’d their course and pass’d on,
What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes
    and nomads,
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,
What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology,
What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death
    and the soul,
Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and
    undevelop’d,
Not a mark, not a record remains—­and yet all remains.

O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more
    than we are for nothing,
I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much
    as we now belong to it.

Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,
Some with oval countenances learn’d and calm,
Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects,
Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,
    laboring, reaping, filling barns,
Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
    libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments. 
Are those billions of men really gone? 
Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone? 
Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us? 
Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves?

I believe of all those men and women that fill’d the unnamed lands,
    every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible to us. 
In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out of
    what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn’d, in life.

I believe that was not the end of those nations or any person of
    them, any more than this shall be the end of my nation, or of me;
Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products,
    games, wars, manners, crimes, prisons, slaves, heroes, poets,
I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen world,
    counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world,
I suspect I shall meet them there,
I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed lands.

} Song of Prudence

Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d pondering,
On Time, Space, Reality—­on such as these, and abreast with them Prudence.

The last explanation always remains to be made about prudence,
Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that
    suits immortality.

The soul is of itself,
All verges to it, all has reference to what ensues,
All that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence,
Not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in a day,
    month, any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of death,
But the same affects him or her onward afterward through the
    indirect lifetime.