Explore "The Past-Present" by Walt Whitman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I was looking a long while for the history of the past for myself, and for these chants -- and now I have found it. / It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither accept nor reject; ) / It is no more in the legends than in all else; / It is in the present -- it is this earth to-day; / It is in Democracy -- in this America -- the Old World also; / It is the life of one man or one woman to-day, the average man of to-day; / It is languages, social customs, literatures, arts; / It is the broad show of artificial things, ships, machinery, politics, creeds, modern improvements, and the interchange of nations, / All for the average man of to-day.