PASSAGE TO INDIA.
(Extracts Selected.)
WALT WHITMAN.

(Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.)
O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,
Thou moral spiritual fountain—affection’s source—thou reservoir,
(O pensive soul of me—O thirst unsatisfied—waitest not there?
Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?)
Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out of myself
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
And lo, thou gently mastereth the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.
Greater than stars or suns,
Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;
What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?
What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours O soul?
What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?
What cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all?
For others’ sake to suffer all?
Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,
The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.
Passage to more than India!
O secret of the earth and sky!
Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!
Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!
O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!
O day and night, passage to you!
O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you!
Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

To determine the real relations that exist between man and God is my thought. It is the need of the times. We need to convince ourselves that man is the object of all earthy resources if we ask ourselves if he is a means to an end. If man is linked to all, is there nothing above him to which, in his turn, he is bound? If he is the last of the unexplained transformations which reach up to him, may he not be the tie between visible and invisible nature? The action of the world is not an absurdity; it leads up to an end, and this object cannot be society constituted as ours is. There is a terrible gap between us and the heavens.

In reality, we cannot ever enjoy or always suffer. To gain either paradise or hell an enormous change must take place in us; without either place, the masses can conceive no idea of God at all.

Is not the idea of motion stamped on the systems of worlds, sufficient to prove God to us? We busy ourselves very little about the pretended nothingness which precedes birth while we fumble in and ransack the dark gulf that awaits us, that is, we make God responsible for our future and we demand from him, no record of the past. To get out of this difficulty the soul has been invented, but it is repugnant to our feelings to render God obligated for human baseness, our disillusions, our decline and fall. How can we admit in ourselves a divine principle over which a potent liquor can get the advantage?

Can we imagine immaterial faculties which matter may utterly subjugate whose exercise a grain of opium can prevent? Is not the communication of motion to matter an unexplored abyss whose difficulties have been rather displaced than resolved by Newton’s system? Motion is a great soul whose alliance with matter is quite as difficult to explain as is the production of thought in man.—Balzac, Louis Lambert. (Translated by Harriett Green Courtis.)