HOW solemn, as one by one,

to use words.Are you full-lung’d and limber-lipp’d from long trial? from vigorouspractice? from physique?Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?Come duly to the divine power to use words?For only at last, after many years–after chastity, friendship,procreation, prudence, and nakedness;After treading ground and breasting river and lake;After a loosen’d throat–after absorbing eras,…

Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)‘Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number,…

Sailing henceforth to every land–to every sea;)We, willing learners of all, teachers of all, and lovers of all.We have watch’d the seasons dispensing themselves, and passing on,We have said, Why should not a man or woman do as much as theseasons, and effuse as much?We dwell a while in every city and town;We pass through…

Singing the strong, light works of engineers,Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires,I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul,The Past! the Past! the Past!The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect! 10The teeming…

Watching the east, the autumn sky.Up through the darkness,While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,Lower, sullen and fast, athwart and down the sky,Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,Ascends, large and calm, the lord-star Jupiter;And nigh at hand, only a very little above,Swim the delicate brothers, the…

As base, and finale too, for all metaphysics.(So, to the students, the old professor,At the close of his crowded course.)Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,Kant having studied and stated–Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,Stated the lore of Plato–and Socrates, greater than Plato,And greater than Socrates sought and stated–Christ divine havingstudied long,I…