Prev | Current Page 251 | Next

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892

"Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy"

Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art
included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We
will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average
bulk, unprecedentedly great.'"

THE WOMEN OF THE WEST
_Kansas City_.--I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the
women of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely
in a store in Main street, Kansas City, a streaming crowd on the
sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all
fashionably drest, and have the look of "gentility" in face, manner
and action, but they do _not_ have, either in physique or the
mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit
or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are
"intellectual" and fashionable, but dyspeptic-looking and generally
doll-like; their ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters.
Something far different and in advance must appear, to tally and
complete the superb masculinity of the west, and maintain and continue
it.

THE SILENT GENERAL
_Sept. 28, '79_.--So General Grant, after circumambiating the
world, has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from
the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history!
what an illustration--his life--of the capacities of that American
individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering "what
the people can see in Grant" to make such a hubbub about.


Pages:
239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263