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Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892

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

This is the American programme, not for classes, but for
universal man, and is embodied in the compacts of the Declaration of
Independence, and, as it began and has now grown, with its amendments,
the Federal Constitution--and in the State governments, with all their
interiors, and with general suffrage; those having the sense not
only of what is in themselves, but that their certain several things
started, planted, hundreds of others in the same direction duly arise
and follow. The Second stage relates to material prosperity, wealth,
produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and
continental railways, intercommunication and trade with all lands,
steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great cities,
cheap appliances for comfort, numberless technical schools, books,
newspapers, a currency for money circulation, &c. The Third stage,
rising out of the previous ones, to make them and all illustrious, I,
now, for one, promulge, announcing a native expression-spirit,
getting into form, adult, and through mentality, for these States,
self-contain'd, different from others, more expansive, more rich
and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by
American personalities, plenty of them, male and female, traversing
the States, none excepted--and by native superber tableaux and growths
of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures, architecture--and by
a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command,
dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from its own interior
and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing society.


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