What best I see in thee,
Is not that where thou mov’st down history’s great highways,
Ever undimm’d by time shoots warlike victory’s dazzle,
Or that thou sat’st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace,
Or thou the man whom feudal Europe feted, venerable Asia swarm’d upon,
Who walk’d with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade;
But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,
Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
    world’s promenade,
Were all so justified.

} Spirit That Form’d This Scene [Written in Platte Canyon, Colorado]

Spirit that form’d this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit—­we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Wast charged against my chants they had forgotten art? 
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse? 
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace—­column
    and polish’d arch forgot? 
But thou that revelest here—­spirit that form’d this scene,
They have remember’d thee.

} As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

As I walk these broad majestic days of peace,
(For the war, the struggle of blood finish’d, wherein, O terrific Ideal,
Against vast odds erewhile having gloriously won,
Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps in time toward denser wars,
Perhaps to engage in time in still more dreadful contests, dangers,
Longer campaigns and crises, labors beyond all others,)
Around me I hear that eclat of the world, politics, produce,
The announcements of recognized things, science,
The approved growth of cities and the spread of inventions.

I see the ships, (they will last a few years,)
The vast factories with their foremen and workmen,
And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object to it.

But I too announce solid things,
Science, ships, politics, cities, factories, are not nothing,
Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring,
    triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight,
They stand for realities—­all is as it should be.

Then my realities;
What else is so real as mine? 
Libertad and the divine average, freedom to every slave on the face
    of the earth,
The rapt promises and lumine of seers, the spiritual world, these
    centuries-lasting songs,
And our visions, the visions of poets, the most solid announcements
    of any.

} A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
    lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.