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Rh Can your performance face the open fields and the
 * sea-side?

Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, nobility,
 * meanness—to appear again in my strength, gait,
 * face?

Have real employments contributed to it? original
 * makers—not amanuenses?

Does it meet modern discoveries, calibers, facts, face
 * to face?

Does it respect me? Democracy? the Soul? to-day? What does it mean to me? to American persons,
 * progresses, cities? Chicago, Kanada, Arkansas?
 * the planter, Yankee, Georgian, native, immigrant,
 * sailors, squatters, old States, new States?

Does it encompass all The States, and the unexceptional
 * rights of all the men and women of the
 * earth, the genital impulse of These States?

Does it see behind the apparent custodians, the
 * real custodians, standing, menacing, silent, the
 * mechanics, Manhattanese, western men, southerners,
 * significant alike in their apathy and in
 * the promptness of their love?

Does it see what befalls and has always befallen
 * each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist,
 * alarmist, infidel, who has ever asked anything
 * of America?

What mocking and scornful negligence? The track strewed with the dust of skeletons? By the roadside others disdainfully tossed?

Rhymes and rhymers pass away—poems distilled
 * from other poems pass away,

The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes;