epart on your way.

"Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air,
(For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any
person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or
some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

"Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

"But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will
certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.

"For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove
victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps
more,
For all is useless without that for which you may guess at many times
and not hit, that which I hinted at,
Therefore release me and depart on your way."

When one has fully mastered this poem he has got a pretty good hold upon
Whitman's spirit and method. His open-air standards, the baffling and
elusive character of his work, the extraordinary demand it makes, its
radical and far-reaching effects upon life, its direct cognizance of evil
as a necessary part of the good (there was a human need of sin, said
Margaret Fuller) its unbookish spirit and affiliations, its indirect and
suggestive method, that it can be fully read only through our acquaintance
with life and real things at first hand, etc.,--all this and more is in
the poem.

HIS SELF-RELIANCE

I

It is over sixty years since Goethe said that to be a German author was t