Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of
    children, bearers of children,
Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins, Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious
    years each emerging from that which preceded it,
Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases, Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days, Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded
    and well-grain’d manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content, Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood, Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

     13
Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights
    they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys, To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it, To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it, To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you,
    however long but it stretches and waits for you,
To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither, To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without
    labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one
    particle of it,
To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant
    villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and
    the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through, To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go, To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter
    them, to gather the love out of their hearts,
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave
    them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for
    traveling souls.

All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—­all that was or is
    apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners
    before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of
    the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.

Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble,
    dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go!  I know that they go, but I know not where they go,
But I know that they go toward the best—­toward something great.