The night in silence under many a star,

The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,

And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil' d death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,

Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,

Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,

I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,

Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume, And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, As to long panoramas of visions.

And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags, Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw them,

And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,

And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)

And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of

the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought,

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not, The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,

And the armies that remain'd suffered.

16

Passing the visions, passing the night,

Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades' hands, Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,

Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying everaltering song,

As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,

Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,

Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven, As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from

recesses,

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

I cease from my song for thee,

From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,

O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night, The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul, With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,

With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands and this for his dear sake,

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

Walt Whitman.

1865.

From the

GETTYSBURG ODE

DEDICATION OF THE NATIONAL MONUMENT

After the eyes that looked, the lips that spake
Here, from the shadows of impending death,
Those words of solemn breath,

What voice may fitly break

The silence, doubly hallowed, left by him?
We can but bow the head, with eyes grown dim,
And, as a Nation's litany, repeat

The phrase his martyrdom hath made complete,
Noble as then, but now more sadly sweet :
"Let us, the Living, rather dedicate

Ourselves to the unfinished work, which they
Thus far advanced so nobly on its way,

And saved the perilled State!

Let us, upon this field where they, the brave,
Their last full measure of devotion gave,
Highly resolve they have not died in vain! -
That, under God, the Nation's later birth

Of Freedom, and the people's gain
Of their own Sovereignty, shall never wane
And perish from the circle of the earth!
From such a perfect text, shall Song aspire
To light her faded fire,

And into wandering music turn
Its virtue, simple, sorrowful, and stern?

His voice all elegies anticipated;

For, whatsoe'er the strain,

We hear that one refrain:

"We consecrate ourselves to them, the Consecrated!"

Bayard Taylor. 1869.

By special permission of

Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.