In them I also seek to set the key-stone
to my democracy's enduring arch. I recollate them now, for the press,
in order to partially occupy and offset days of strange sickness,
and the heaviest affliction and bereavement of my life; and I fondly
please myself with the notion of leaving that cluster to you, O
unknown reader of the future, as "something to remember me by," more
especially than all else. Written in former days of perfect health,
little did I think the pieces had the purport that now, under present
circumstances, opens to me.
[As I write these lines, May 31, 1875, it is again early summer,
--again my birth-day--now my fifty-sixth. Amid the outside beauty and
freshness, the sunlight and verdure of the delightful season, O how
different the moral atmosphere amid which I now revise this Volume,
from the jocund influence surrounding the growth and advent of "Leaves
of Grass." I occupy myself, arranging these pages for publication,
still envelopt in thoughts of the death two years since of my
dear Mother, the most perfect and magnetic character, the rarest
combination of practical, moral and spiritual, and the least selfish,
of all and any I have ever known--and by me O so much the most deeply
loved--and also under the physical affliction of a tedious attack of
paralysis, obstinately lingering and keeping its hold upon me, and
quite suspending all bodily activity and comfort.]
Under these influences, therefore, I still feel to keep "Passage to
India" for last words even to this centennial dithyramb.
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