YEAR that trembled and reel’d beneath me!

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,musical, self-sufficient;I see that the word of my city is that word up there,Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, withtall and wonderful spires,Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships–anisland sixteen miles long, solid-founded,Numberless crowded streets–high…

Lo! me, ever open and helpless, bereft of my strength!Utterly abject, grovelling on the ground before them.

Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,From all the standards hitherto publish’d–from the pleasures,profits, eruditions, conformities,Which too long I was offering to feed my soul;Clear to me, now, standards not yet publish’d–clear to me that mySoul,That the Soul of the man I speak for, feeds, rejoices most incomrades;Here, by myself, away from the clank of…

I stand apart to hear–it never tires me.To you, your name also;Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations inthe sound of your name?

I heard what was said of the universe,Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all?Magnifying and applying come I,Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,Buying drafts of Osiris,…

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the childleaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,Down from the shower’d halo,Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting asif they were alive,Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,From your…