ey balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes;
They do not seek beauty, they are sought,
Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain,
love-sick.
They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the
outset,
They bring none to his or her terminus or to be contented and full,
Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to
learn one of the meanings,
To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings
and never be quiet again.

* * * * *

"Of these States the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of
their full returns,
Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more
nor less,
He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
He is the equalizer of his age and land,
He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,
In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty,
building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts, commerce,
lighting the study of man, the soul, health, immortality,
government,
In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as good as
the engineer's, he can make every word he speaks draw blood,
The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith,
He is no arguer, he is judgment (nature accepts him absolutely),
He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a
helpless thing,
As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and omen as
dreams or dots.

* * * * *

"Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill'd from other poems pass
away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
Admirers, impostors, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature."

Folded up in these sentences, often many times folded up, is Whitman's
idea of the poet, the begetter, the reconciler; not the priest of the
beautiful, but the master of the All, who does