Thus my form has strictly grown from my purports and facts, and is the
analogy of them. Within my time the United States have emerged from
nebulous vagueness and suspense, to full orbic, (though varied,)
decision--have done the deeds and achiev'd the triumphs of half a
score of centuries--and are henceforth to enter upon their real
history the way being now, (_i.e._ since the result of the secession
war,) clear'd of death-threatening impedimenta, and the free areas
around and ahead of us assured and certain, which were not so
before--(the past century being but preparations, trial voyages and
experiments of the ship, before her starting out upon deep water.)
In estimating my volumes, the world's current times and deeds, and
their spirit, must be first profoundly estimated. Out of the hundred
years just ending, (1776-1876,) with their genesis of inevitable
wilful events, and new experiments and introductions, and many
unprecedented things of war and peace, (to be realized better, perhaps
only realized, at the remove of a century hence;) out of that stretch
of time, and especially out of the immediately preceding twenty-five
years, (1850-'75,) with all their rapid changes, innovations,
and audacious movements-and bearing their own inevitable wilful
birth-marks--the experiments of my poems too have found genesis.
W. W.
Notes:
[33] PASSAGE TO INDIA.--As in some ancient legend-play, to close the
plot and the hero's career, there is a farewell gathering on ship's
deck and on shore, a loosing of hawsers and ties, a spreading of sails
to the wind--a starting out on unknown seas, to fetch up no one knows
whither--to return no more--and the curtain falls, and there is the
end of it--so I have reserv'd that poem, with its cluster, to finish
and explain much that, without them, would not be explain'd, and to
take leave, and escape for good, from all that has preceded them.
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