Page:Leaves of Grass (1882).djvu/377

Rh Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!

His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes,

With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,

With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all geography, all lands;

What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas?

Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?

Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim,

The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,

No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights;

Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms,

Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,

This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams O years!

Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake;)

The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,

The unperformed, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me. 



of soldiers South or North,

As I muse retrospective murmuring a chant in thought,

The war resumes, again to my sense your shapes,

And again the advance of the armies.

Noiseless as mists and vapors,

From their graves in the trenches ascending,

From cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee,

From every point of the compass out of the countless graves,

In wafted clouds, in myriads large, or squads of twos or threes or single ones they come,

And silently gather round me.

Now sound no note O trumpeters,

Not at the head of my cavalry parading on spirited horses, 