11
Her shape arises,
She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever, The gross and soil’d she moves among do not make her gross and soil’d, She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is conceal’d from her, She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor, She is the best belov’d, it is without exception, she has no reason
    to fear and she does not fear,
Oaths, quarrels, hiccupp’d songs, smutty expressions, are idle to
    her as she passes,
She is silent, she is possess’d of herself, they do not offend her, She receives them as the laws of Nature receive them, she is strong, She too is a law of Nature—­there is no law stronger than she is.

12
The main shapes arise! 
Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries,
Shapes ever projecting other shapes,
Shapes of turbulent manly cities,
Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
Shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.

[Book XIII]

} Song of the Exposition

1
(Ah little recks the laborer,
How near his work is holding him to God,
The loving Laborer through space and time.)

After all not to create only, or found only,
But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,
To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,
Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,
To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,
These also are the lessons of our New World;
While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

Long and long has the grass been growing,
Long and long has the rain been falling,
Long has the globe been rolling round.

     2
Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and AEneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus, Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on jaffa’s gate and on
    Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles,
    and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain
    awaits, demands you.

3
Responsive to our summons,
Or rather to her long-nurs’d inclination,
Join’d with an irresistible, natural gravitation,
She comes!  I hear the rustling of her gown,
I scent the odor of her breath’s delicious fragrance,
I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling,
Upon this very scene.

The dame of dames! can I believe then,
Those ancient temples, sculptures classic, could none of them retain her? 
Nor shades of Virgil and Dante, nor myriad memories, poems, old
    associations, magnetize and hold on to her? 
But that she’s left them all—­and here?