No More Learning

Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and
animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names;
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta,
Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla;
Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and
the land with names.


18.

O expanding and swift! O henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;
A world primal again--vistas of glory, incessant and branching;
A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far, with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

These my voice announcing--I will sleep no more, but arise;
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,
stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.


19.

See! steamers steaming through my poems!
See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing;
See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the
maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village;
See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how
they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores;
See pastures and forests in my poems--See animals, wild and tame--See,
beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short
curly grass;
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with
iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce;
See the many-cylindered steam printing-press--See the electric telegraph,
stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan;
See, through Atlantica's depths, pulses American, Europe reaching--pulses
of Europe, duly returned;
See the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the
steam-whistle;
See ploughmen, ploughing farms--See miners, digging mines--See the
numberless factories;
See mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools--See, from among them,
superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working
dresses;
See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me, well-beloved,
close-held by day and night;
Hear the loud echoes of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.


20.

O Camerado close!
O you and me at last--and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph--and you shall also;
O hand in hand--O wholesome pleasure--O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste, firm holding--to haste, haste on, with me.

[Footnote 1: Paumanok is the native name of Long Island, State of New York.
It presents a fish-like shape on the map. ]

[Footnote 2: Mannahatta, or Manhattan, is (as many readers will know) New
York. ]

[Footnote 3: 1856. ]

[Footnote 4: The poet here contemplates himself as yet living spiritually
and in his poems after the death of the body, still a friend and brother to
all present and future American lands and persons. ]

[Footnote 5: New Hampshire. ]

[Footnote 6: New York State. ]



_AMERICAN FEUILLAGE. _


AMERICA always!
Always our own feuillage!
Always Florida's green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana!