THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 199 
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me; 
We must have a turn together —I undress — hurry me out of 
sight of the land; 
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse; 
Dash me with amorous wet —I can repay you. 
* Sea of stretch’d ground-swells! 
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! 
Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel’d yet always ready 
graves! 
Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea! 
I am integral with you—I too am of one phase, and of all 
phases.”’ 
This other passage would afford many a text for 
the moralists and essayists: — 
**Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, schol- 
arship, and the like; 
To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from 
them, except as it results to their Bodies and Souls, 
So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked, 
And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself 
or herself, 
And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of 
the rotten excrement of maggots; 
And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the 
true realities of life, and go toward false realities, 
And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served 
them, but nothing more, 
And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules, 
walking the dusk.”’ 
Ah, Time, you enchantress! what tricks you play 
with us! The old is already proved, — the past and 
the distant hold nothing but the beautiful. 
Or let us take another view. Suppose Walt 
Whitman had never existed, and some bold essayist, 
like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected 
him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal 
background, formulated and put in harmless critical 
