Complete Prose Works (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...Out of them, and by them mainly, have come, out of Albic, Roman and Saxon England-and without them could not have come-not only the England of the 500 years down to the present, and of the present-but these States. Nor, except for that terrible dislocation and overturn, would these States, as they are, exist to-day. It is certain to me that the United States, by virtue of that war and its results, and through that and them only, are now ready to enter, and must certainly enter, upon their genuine career in history, as no more torn and divided in their spinal requisites, but a great homogeneous Nation-free States all-a moral and political unity in variety, such as Nature shows in her grandest physical works, and as much greater than any mere work of Nature, as the moral and political, the work of man, his mind, his soul, are, in their loftiest sense, greater than the merely physical. Out of that war not only has the nationality of the States escaped from being strangled, but more than any of the rest, and, in my opinion, more than the north itself, the vital heart and breath of the south have escaped as from the pressure of a general nightmare, and are henceforth to enter on a life, development, and active freedom, whose realities are certain in the future, notwithstanding all the southern vexations of the hour-a development which could not possibly have been achiev'd on any less terms, or by any other means than that grim lesson, or something equivalent to it. And I predict that the south is yet to outstrip the north. PREFACES TO "LEAVES OF GRASS" PREFACE, 1855 _To first issue of Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, N.Y. America does not repel the past, or what the past has produced under its forms, or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or the old religions-accepts the lesson with calmness-is not impatient because the slough still sticks to opinions and manners in literature, while the life which served its requirements has passed into...