parasites with
    color’d flowers and berries enveloping huge trees,
The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low,
    noiselessly waved by the wind,
The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and
    the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding
    from troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees,
    the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising;
Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North
    Carolina’s coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the
    large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work’d by horses, the
    clearing, curing, and packing-houses;
Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the
    incisions in the trees, there are the turpentine works,
There are the negroes at work in good health, the ground in all
    directions is cover’d with pine straw;
In Tennessee and Kentucky slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge,
    by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking,
In Virginia, the planter’s son returning after a long absence,
    joyfully welcom’d and kiss’d by the aged mulatto nurse,
On rivers boatmen safely moor’d at nightfall in their boats under
    shelter of high banks,
Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle,
    others sit on the gunwale smoking and talking;
Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing
    in the Great Dismal Swamp,
There are the greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous
    moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree;
Northward, young men of Mannahatta, the target company from an
    excursion returning home at evening, the musket-muzzles all
    bear bunches of flowers presented by women;
Children at play, or on his father’s lap a young boy fallen asleep,
    (how his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!)
The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the
    Mississippi, he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eyes around;
California life, the miner, bearded, dress’d in his rude costume,
    the stanch California friendship, the sweet air, the graves one
    in passing meets solitary just aside the horse-path;
Down in Texas the cotton-field, the negro-cabins, drivers driving
    mules or oxen before rude carts, cotton bales piled on banks
    and wharves;
Encircling all, vast-darting up and wide, the American Soul, with
    equal hemispheres, one Love, one Dilation or Pride;
In arriere the peace-talk with the Iroquois the aborigines, the
    calumet, the pipe of good-will, arbitration, and indorsement,
The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward
    the earth,
The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural