The Uprising by Walt Whitman — Read

1. Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier and fiercer sweep! / Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devoured what the earth gave me; / Long I roamed the woods of the North -- long I watched Niagara pouring; / I travelled the prairies over, and slept on their breast -- I crossed the Nevadas, / I crossed the plateaus; / I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sailed out to sea; / I sailed through the storm, I was refreshed by the storm; / I watched with joy the threatening maws of the waves; / I marked the white combs where they careered so high, curling over; / I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds; / Saw from below what arose and mounted, (O superb! O wild as my heart, and powerful! ) / Heard the continuous thunder, as it bellowed after the lightning; / Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast amid / the din they chased each other across the sky; / -- These, and such as these, I, elate, saw -- saw with wonder, yet pensive and / masterful; / All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me; / Yet there with my soul I fed -- I fed content, supercilious.

2. 'Twas well, O soul! 'twas a good preparation you gave me! / Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill; / Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us; / Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities; / Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring; / Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the North-west, are you indeed / inexhaustible? ) / What, to pavements and homesteads here -- what were those storms of the / mountains and sea? / What, to passions I witness around me to-day, was the sea risen? / Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?