Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected
     materials,
America brings builders, and brings its own styles.

The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their
     work and pass'd to other spheres,
A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its
     own at all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the
     true use of precedents,
Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced
     under their forms,
Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly
     borne from the house,
Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was
     fittest for its days,
That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped
     heir who approaches,
And that he shall be fittest for his days.

Any period one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

These States are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast
     doings of the day and night,

Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of
     particulars,
Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the
     soul loves,
Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity,
     the soul loves.

6

Land of lands and bards to corroborate!
Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-
    bred face,
To him the hereditary countenance bequeath'd both mother's
     and father's,
His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,
Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck
     with incomparable love,
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal
     in him,
Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,
     Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in
     him,
If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he
     stretching with them North or South,
Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever
     is between them,
Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine,
     cedar, hemlock, live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory,
     cottonwood, orange, magnolia,
Tangles as tangled in him as any cranebake or swamp,
He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated
     with northern transparent ice,
Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland,
     prairie,
Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the
     fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,

His spirit surrounding his country's spirit, unclosed to good
     and evil,
Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and pre
    sent times,
Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red
     aborigines,
Weather- beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo
     stature and muscle,
The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the
     formation of the Constitution,
The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the
     immigrants,
The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure
     and impregnable,
The unsurvey'd interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,
     hunters, trappers,
Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature,
     the gestation of new States,
Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly
     coming up from the uttermost parts,
Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers,
     especially the young men,
Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships,
     the gait they have of persons who never knew how it felt to
     stand in the presence of superiors,
The freshness and candor of their physiognomy,
     the copiousness and decision of their phrenology,
The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness
     when wrong'd,
The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,
     good temper and open-handedness, the whole
     composite make,
The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large
     amativeness,
The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid
     movement of the population,
The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling,
     golddigging,
Wharf-hemm'd cities, railroad and steamboat lines
     intersecting all points,
Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the
     Northeast, Northwest, Southwest,
Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation
     life,
Slavery — the murderous, treacherous