(Then probably "Passage to India," and its cluster, are but freer vent
and fuller expression to what, from the first, and so on throughout,
more or less lurks in my writings, underneath every page, every line,
everywhere.)
I am not sure but the last inclosing sublimation of race or poem is,
what it thinks of death. After the rest has been comprehended and
said, even the grandest--after those contributions to mightiest
nationality, or to sweetest song, or to the best personalism, male or
female, have been glean'd from the rich and varied themes of tangible
life, and have been fully accepted and sung, and the pervading fact
of visible existence, with the duty it devolves, is rounded and
apparently completed, it still remains to be really completed by
suffusing through the whole and several, that other pervading
invisible fact, so large a part, (is it not the largest part?) of life
here, combining the rest, and furnishing, for person or State, the
only permanent and unitary meaning to all, even the meanest life,
consistently with the dignity of the universe, in Time. As from the
eligibility to this thought, and the cheerful conquest of this fact,
flash forth the first distinctive proofs of the soul, so to me,
(extending it only a little further,) the ultimate Democratic
purports, the ethereal and spiritual ones, are to concentrate here,
and as fixed stars, radiate hence. For, in my opinion, it is no less
than this idea of immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter
into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to democracy in
the New World.
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