hitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary
prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all
conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any
human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the
race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops
and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a
worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but ejaculations--things
mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an
immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt
the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply
to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy
to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is
what he feels:--

Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see
you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes!
how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence,
are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
might suppose.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from
shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the
sun half an hour high.
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the
falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It avails not, neither time or place--distance avails not.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I
felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
crowd;
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and
the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the
thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
I too many and many a