Read "Night and Death" by Walt Whitman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
1. Night on the prairies. / The supper is over -- the fire on the ground burns low; / The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapped in their blankets; / I walk by myself -- I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never / realised before.
Now I absorb immortality and peace, / I admire death, and test propositions.
How plenteous! How spiritual! How _resumé_! / The same Old Man and Soul -- the same old aspirations, and the same content.
2. I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not day exhibited, / I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around / me myriads of other globes.
Now, while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me, I will measure / myself by them: / And now, touched with the lives of other globes, arrived as far along as / those of the earth, / Or waiting to arrive, or passed on farther than those of the earth, / I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life, / Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.
3. O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me-as the day cannot, / I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.