Does this answer? Is it
for the nursing of the young of the republic? Does it solve readily
with the sweet milk of the nipples of the breasts of the Mother of
Many Children?
America prepares with Composure and good-will for the visitors that
have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and
welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the
statesman, the erudite, are not unappreciated--they fall in their
place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. It
rejects none, it permits all. Only toward the like of itself will it
advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has
the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and
wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of
its poets.
PREFACE, 1872 To As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free Now Thou Mother with
thy Equal Brood, _in permanent edition_.
The impetus and ideas urging me, for some years past, to an utterance,
or attempt at utterance, of New World songs, and an epic of Democracy,
having already had their publish'd expression, as well as I can expect
to give it, in "Leaves of Grass," the present and any future pieces
from me are really but the surplusage forming after that volume,
or the wake eddying behind it. I fulfill'd in that an imperious
conviction, and the commands of my nature as total and irresistible
as those which make the sea flow, or the globe revolve. But of this
supplementary volume, I confess I am not so certain.
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