< Page:Leaves of Grass (1860).djvu
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Chants Democratic.
- Historian! you who celebrate bygones!
- You have explored the outward, the surface of the races—the life that has exhibited itself,
- You have treated man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers, and priests;
- But now I also, arriving, contribute something:
- I, an habitue of the Alleghanies, treat man as he is in the influences of Nature, in himself, in his own inalienable rights,
- Advancing, to give the spirit and the traits of new Democratic ages, myself, personally,
- (Let the future behold them all in me—Me, so puzzling and contradictory—Me, a Manhattanese, the most loving and arrogant of men;)
- I do not tell the usual facts, proved by records and documents,
- What I tell, (talking to every born American,) requires no further proof than he or she who will hear me, will furnish, by silently meditating alone;
- I press the pulse of the life that has hitherto seldom exhibited itself, but has generally sought concealment, (the great pride of man, in himself,)
- I illuminate feelings, faults, yearnings, hopes—I have come at last, no more ashamed nor afraid;
- Chanter of Personality, outlining a history yet to be,
- I project the ideal man, the American of the future.
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