Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on ‘Lands To Be Welded Together’)

“Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.” — American poet and editor Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “Passage to India” (1871)

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on an Earlier American Crisis of the Spirit)

“I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.” —American poet-editor Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Democratic Vistas (1871)

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on the Greatest Danger to America)

“Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.”—American poet-essayist Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Democratic Vistas (1871)

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on How ‘Every Hour of the Light and Dark is a Miracle’)

“To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is
  spread with the same,
 
Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass—the frames, limbs, organs,
  of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.”—American poet and editor Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “Poem of Perfect Miracles,” in Leaves of Grass (1856 edition)

Photo of the Day: ‘Trees All Cover'd With Blossoms’

“Apple orchards, the trees all cover'd with blossoms;

Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green;

The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning;

The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun;

The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers.”—American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “Out of May's Shows Selected,” New York Herald, May 10, 1888

I must confess here to a bit of poetic—or, to be more accurate, photographic—license. I took this picture a year ago, but it was not in one of the apple orchards that Whitman memorably conjured up here, but on the street where I live in Bergen County, N.J.

Still, I hope I’ll be forgiven. The image I wanted to preserve here was one of beauty—and one that, perhaps, so many of us can use now, stuck as we are in our homes more than we want to, amid this coronavirus outbreak.

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on a Fallen Union Soldier)

“Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;

When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground.”— American poet and Civil War volunteer nurse Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” from Drum-Taps (1864)

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on American Hypocrisy 150 Years Ago)

"I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believed in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men…. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business (this all-devouring modern world, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and moneymaking is our magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dressed speculators and vulgarians.” —American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Democratic Vistas (1871)

“Melodramatic screamings”? “Atmosphere of hypocrisy”? Men and women who don’t believe in each other? “The depravity of the business classes”? “Speculators and vulgarians”? Have any of these post-Civil War conditions changed, really?

Maybe--except that, as soon as one reform is introduced, somebody thinks of a way to circumvent it.

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on ‘That Music Always Round Me’)

“That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning,

yet long untaught I did not hear,

But now the chorus I hear and am elated,

A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of daybreak I hear,

A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,

A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,

The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and violins, all of these I fill myself with,

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings,

I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;

I do not think the performers know themselves-but now I think I begin to know them.” —American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), "That Music Always Round Me," in the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" section in Whitman's last edition of Leaves of Grass

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on the Soul’s ‘Flight Into the Wordless’)

"This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.

Night, sleep, death and the stars."— Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight," in Leaves of Grass, Seventh Edition (1881)