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146 To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy.

O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys! To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on! To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports, A ship itself … A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys. Elsewhere the hymn rises still more rapturously, and ends in a way that reminds one of the beginning of Pascal’s Prière de Jésus:

In this case the Dionysiac and Nietzschean exultation mingles with the universal optimism of Whitman, and in a certain sense purifies it. But the American prophet suggests the German poet in another respect also: in his pride. Whitman loves to call himself “more vain than modest,” and reveals himself “proud of his