Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the
    peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—­welcoming the darker odds, the dross: 
—­Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—­while the heart
    pants, life glows: 
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

} With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

With husky-haughty lips, O sea! 
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk—­thy unloos’d hurricanes,
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears—­a lack from all
    eternity in thy content,
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee
    greatest—­no less could make thee,)
Thy lonely state—­something thou ever seek’st and seek’st, yet
    never gain’st,
Surely some right withheld—­some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of
    freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those breakers,
By lengthen’d swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
And undertones of distant lion roar,
(Sounding, appealing to the sky’s deaf ear—­but now, rapport for once,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
The first and last confession of the globe,
Outsurging, muttering from thy soul’s abysms,
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.

} Death of General Grant

As one by one withdraw the lofty actors,
From that great play on history’s stage eterne,
That lurid, partial act of war and peace—­of old and new contending,
Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense;
All past—­and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing,
Victor’s and vanquish’d—­Lincoln’s and Lee’s—­now thou with them,
Man of the mighty days—­and equal to the days! 
Thou from the prairies!—­tangled and many-vein’d and hard has been thy part,
To admiration has it been enacted!

} Red Jacket (From Aloft)

Upon this scene, this show,
Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
(Nor in caprice alone—­some grains of deepest meaning,)
Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes,
As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill’d with its soul,
Product of Nature’s sun, stars, earth direct—­a towering human form,
In hunting-shirt of film, arm’d with the rifle, a half-ironical
    smile curving its phantom lips,
Like one of Ossian’s ghosts looks down.