Their manners speech dress friendships – the freshness and candor of their physiognomy – the picturesque looseness of their carriage. but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors. Other states indicate themselves in their deputies. One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women.

Here the performance disdaining the trivial unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings and the push of its perspective spreads with crampless and flowing breadth and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. and that he shall be fittest for his days. that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches. perceives that it waits a little while in the door. perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house. is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms. America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions.

Leaves of grass poem text