It was originally my intention, after chanting in "Leaves of Grass"
the songs of the body and existence, to then compose a further,
equally needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and
conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul
govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the
theme of my first chants, to shift the slides, and exhibit the problem
and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed personality
entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law,
and with cheerful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation,
but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the
greatest part of existence, and something that life is at least as
much for, as it is for itself. But the full construction of such a
work is beyond my powers, and must remain for some bard in the future.
The physical and the sensuous, in themselves or in their immediate
continuations, retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely
releas'd; and those holds I have not only not denied, but hardly
wish'd to weaken.
Meanwhile, not entirely to give the go-by to my original plan, and far
more to avoid a mark'd hiatus in it, than to entirely fulfil it, I
end my books with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on death,
immortality, and a free entrance into the spiritual world. In those
thoughts, in a sort, I make the first steps or studies toward the
mighty theme, from the point of view necessitated by my foregoing
poems, and by modern science.
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