Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy

Listen, and the old will speak a chronicle for the young. Ah, youth! thou art one day coming to be old, too. And let me tell thee how thou mayest get a useful lesson. For an hou...

"You must know, sir," continued Gills, "I am myself a sort of intruder here. The Vanhomes--that was the name of the former residents and owners--I have never seen; for when I ca...

Now Charles was not exactly frighten'd, for he was a lively fellow, and had often been at the country merry-makings, and at the parties of the place; but he was certainly rather...

Among the early clients of Mr. Covert had been a distant relative named Marsh, who, dying somewhat suddenly, left his son and daughter, and some little property, to the care of...

Arriving at La Salle Tuesday morning, we went on board a canal-boat, had a detention by sticking on a mud bar, and then jogg'd along at a slow trot, some seventy of us, on a mod...

J. G. lies in bed 52, ward I; is of company B, 7th Pennsylvania. I gave him a small sum of money, some tobacco, and envelopes. To a man adjoining also gave twenty-five cents; he...

As I sit here writing to you, M., I wish you could see the whole scene. This young man lies within reach of me, flat on his back, his hands clasp'd across his breast, his thick...

_July 25, '81.--Far Rockaway, L. I._--A good day here, on a jaunt, amid the sand and salt, a steady breeze setting in from the sea, the sun shining, the sedge-odor, the noise of...

Here is a case of a soldier I found among the crowded cots in the Patent-office. He likes to have some one to talk to, and we will listen to him. He got badly hit in his leg and...

"Of Abraham Lincoln, bearing testimony twenty-five years after his death--and of that death--I am now my friends before you. Few realize the days, the great historic and estheti...

To me, too, Booth stands for much else besides theatricals. I consider that my seeing the man those years glimps'd for me, beyond all else, that inner spirit and form--the unque...

_Aug., Sept., and Oct., '63._--I am in the habit of going to all, and to Fairfax seminary, Alexandria, and over Long bridge to the great Convalescent camp. The journals publish...

_Feb. 6_.--As I cross home in the 6 P. M. boat again, the transparent shadows are filled everywhere with leisurely falling, slightly slanting, curiously sparse but very large, f...

Of the war itself, we know in the ostent what has been done. The numbers of the dead and wounded can be told or approximated, the debt posted and put on record, the material eve...

There is no undue element of pensiveness in Longfellow's strains. Even in the early translation, the Manrique, the movement is as of strong and steady wind or tide, holding up a...

Indeed, of this important element of the theory and practice of Quakerism, the difficult-to-describe "Light within" or "Inward Law, by which all must be either justified or cond...

After the close of the secession war in 1865, I work'd several months (until Mr. Harlan turn'd me out for having written "Leaves of Grass") in the Interior Department at Washing...

NEW YORK, _May 24, '79_.--Perhaps no quarters of this city (I have return'd again for awhile,) make more brilliant, animated, crowded, spectacular human presentations these fine...

Then there was silence awhile. During the hour just by-gone, Jane had, in her childish way, bestow'd a little gift upon each of her kindred, as a remembrancer when she should be...

I am the more assured in recounting Hegel a little freely here,[17] not only for offsetting the Carlylean letter and spirit-cutting it out all and several from the very roots, a...

The poetry of the future, (a phrase open to sharp criticism, and not satisfactory to me, but significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of the future aims at the free expressio...

_Frank H. Irwin, company E, 93rd Pennsylvania--died May 1, '65--My letter to his mother_--Dear madam: No doubt you and Frank's friends have heard the sad fact of his death in ho...

The purpose of democracy--supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the onl...

As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employ'd with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or comment--and th...

And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others--to me the main interest I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in the rank and file of t...

The great "Egyptian Collection" was well up in Broadway, and I got quite acquainted with Dr. Abbott, the proprietor--paid many visits there, and had long talks with him, in conn...

This musical passion follow'd my theatrical one. As a boy or young man I had seen, (reading them carefully the day beforehand,) quite all Shakspere's acting dramas, play'd wonde...

One of my war time reminiscences comprises the quiet side scene of a visit I made to the First Regiment U. S. Color'd Troops, at their encampment, and on the occasion of their f...

On this important occasion, we felt the clear and consoling evidence of divine truth, and it remain'd with us as a seal upon our spirits, strengthening us mutually to bear, with...

But the katydid--how shall I describe its piquant utterances? One sings from a willow-tree just outside my open bedroom window, twenty yards distant; every clear night for a for...

And the real history of the United States--starting from that great convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly concluded, and _the South_ victorious after al...

"The Whitmans, at the beginning of the present century, lived in a long story-and-a-half farm-house, hugely timber'd, which is still standing. A great smoke-canopied kitchen, wi...

Death--too great a subject to be treated so--indeed the greatest subject--and yet I am giving you but a few random lines about it--as one writes hurriedly the last part of a let...

The valley of the Mississippi river and its tributaries, (this stream and its adjuncts involve a big part of the question,) comprehends more than twelve hundred thousand square...

As a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce paradoxes, its din, and its strugglin...

Then, in the thought of nationality especially for the United States, and making them original, and different from all other countries, another point ever remains to be consider...

"to a Mountain Daisy," "to a Haggis," "to a Louse," "to the Toothache," &c.--and occasionally to his brother bards and lady or gentleman patrons, often with strokes of tenderest...

_Oct. 24_.--Saw a large squad of our own deserters (over 300) surrounded with a cordon of arm'd guards, marching along Pennsylvania avenue. The most motley collection I ever saw...

[34] Namely, a character, making most of common and normal elements, to the superstructure of which not only the precious accumulations of the learning and experiences of the Ol...

Grand as to-day's accumulative fund of poetry is, there is certainly something unborn, not yet come forth, different from anything now formulated in any verse, or contributed by...

_March 8_.--I write this down in the country again, but in a new spot, seated on a log in the woods, warm, sunny, midday. Have been loafing here deep among the trees, shafts of...

All the poems of Orientalism, with the Old and New Testaments at the centre, tend to deep and wide, (I don't know but the deepest and widest,) psychological development--with li...

_May 23, '64_.--Sometimes I think that should it come when it _must_, to fall in battle, one's anguish over a son or brother kill'd might be temper'd with much to take the edge...

_March 4th._--The President very quietly rode down to the capitol in his own carriage, by himself, on a sharp trot, about noon, either because he wish'd to be on hand to sign bi...

When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my poems, and continued turning over that plan, and shifting it in my mind through many years, (from the age of twenty-eight...

A Happy Hour's Command Answer to an Insisting Friend Genealogy--Van Velsor and Whitman The Old Whitman and Van Velsor Cemeteries The Maternal Homestead Two Old Family Interiors...

The day, April 14, 1865, seems to have been a pleasant one throughout the whole land--the moral atmosphere pleasant too--the long storm, so dark, so fratricidal, full of blood a...

Then the Camden ferry. What exhilaration, change, people, business, by day. What soothing, silent, wondrous hours, at night, crossing on the boat, most all to myself--pacing the...

_June 25_.--Returned to New York last night. Out to-day on the waters for a sail in the wide bay, southeast of Staten island--a rough, tossing ride, and a free sight--the long s...

In the prophetic literature of these States, (the reader of my speculations will miss their principal stress unless he allows well for the point that a new Literature, perhaps a...

Attempting, then, however crudely, a basic model or portrait of personality for general use for the manliness of the States, (and doubtless that is most useful which is most sim...

Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!) I, too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an acute and good man, had impressively said...

The jaunt of five or six hundred miles from Topeka to Denver took me through a variety of country, but all unmistakably prolific, western, American, and on the largest scale. Fo...

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or th...

For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand--those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving...

George Fox, born 1624, was of decent stock, in ordinary lower life--as he grew along toward manhood, work'd at shoemaking, also at farm labors--loved to be much by himself, half...

I have myself little or no hope from what is technically called "Society" in our American cities. New York, of which place I have spoken so sharply, still promises something, in...

Men and women, and the earth and all upon it, are to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be unintermitted, and shall be done w...

"The wonderful wealth-producing power of the United States defies and sets at naught the grave drawbacks of a mischievous protective tariff, and has already obliterated, almost...

The summary of my suggestion would be, therefore, that while the more the rich and tangled jungle of the Shaksperean area is travers'd and studied, and the more baffled and mix'...

Essentially my own printed records, all my volumes, are doubtless but off-hand utterances f'm Personality spontaneous, following implicitly the inscrutable command, dominated by...