Great Throughts Treasury

"You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, we receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate hence-forward, not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, we use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us, we fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also, you furnish your parts, toward eternity, great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul."

"You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things."

"You my rich blood! you milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions! Root of washed sweet flag! timorous pond snipe! next of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!"

"You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead,... You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."

"You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, but I shall be good health to you nevertheless, and filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another,I stop somewhere waiting for you."

"Your true soul and body appear before me. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, none has understood you, but I understand you, none has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, none but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, none but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits instrinsically in yourself. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life, your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time. I pursue you where none else has pursued you. Conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me. I give nothing to anyone except I give the like carefully to you. These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they, these furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution."

"Your very flesh shall be a great poem."

"Youth, large, lusty, loving -- Youth, full of grace, force, fascination. Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?"

"A new founded literature, not merely to copy and reflect existing surfaces, or pander to what is called taste ? but a literature underlying life, religious, consistent with science, handling the elements and forces with competent power, teaching and training men ? and, as perhaps the most precious of its results, achieving the entire redemption of woman ? and thus insuring to the States a strong and sweet Female Race? ? is what is needed."

"America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brain?d nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers. It is the dilettantes, and all who shirk their duty, who are not doing well? America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without."

"At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway?d the most, and whence it sways others, is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy. Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes at will."

"Far, far, indeed, stretch, in distance, our Vistas! How much is still to be disentangled, freed! How long it takes to make this American world see that it is, in itself, the final authority and reliance! Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs ? in religion, literature, colleges, and schools ? democracy in all public and private life."

"I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election."

"In the civilization of to-day it is undeniable that, over all the arts, literature dominates, serves beyond all ? shapes the character of church and school ? or, at any rate, is capable of doing so. Including the literature of science, its scope is indeed unparallel?d."

"Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn ? they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account."

"Should some two or three really original American poets, (perhaps artists or lecturers,) arise, mounting the horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, that, from their eminence, fusing contributions, races, far localities, &c., together they would give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed,) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic experiences."

"To take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and archetypal models ? to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future ? these, and these only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real materials; but the wise know that they do not become real till touched by emotions, the mind."

"Enter more strongly yet into politics? Always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote."

"I have sometimes thought ? that the sole avenue and means of a reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth, elevation, expansion, invigoration of woman? Great, great, indeed, far greater than they know, is the sphere of women."

"We had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ?d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ?d in."

"Our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results? In vain have we annex?d Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow?d with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul."

"The literature, songs, esthetics, &c., of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective ways."

"The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What baulks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy."

"The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes ? but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects ? they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

"Without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time."

"There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal."

"The literature, songs, esthetics of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective ways."