Through the soft evening air enwinding all,
Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes,
Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,
Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,
Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish,
And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)
Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
Music, Italian music in Dakota.

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,
Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
Acknowledging rapport however far remov’d,
(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
Listens well pleas’d.

} With All Thy Gifts

With all thy gifts America,
Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,
Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee—­with these and like of
    these vouchsafed to thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)
The gift of perfect women fit for thee—­what if that gift of gifts
    thou lackest? 
The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee? 
The mothers fit for thee?

} My Picture-Gallery

In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house,
It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;
Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories! 
Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;
Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,
With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures.

} The Prairie States

A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude,
Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,
With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,
By all the world contributed—­freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s society,
The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations,
To justify the past.

[Book XXV]

} Proud Music of the Storm

1
Proud music of the storm,
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
Strong hum of forest tree-tops—­wind of the mountains,
Personified dim shapes—­you hidden orchestras,
You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,
Blending with Nature’s rhythmus all the tongues of nations;
You chords left as by vast composers—­you choruses,
You formless, free, religious dances—­you from the Orient,
You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts,
You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry,
Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls,
Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless,
Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz’d me?