The complete writings of Walt Whitman Author:Walt Whitman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: H Backwarf c (Blance o'er Cravel'fc TRoafcs Perhaps the best of songs heard, or of any and all true love, or life's fairest episodes, or sailors', soldiers... more »' trying scenes on land or sea, is the randsumk of them, or any of them, long afterwards, looking at the actualities away back past, with all their practical excitations gone. How the soul loves to float amid such reminiscences! So here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age — I and my book — casting backward glances over our travel'd road. After completing, as it were, the journey — (a varied jaunt of years, with many halts and gaps of intervals — or some lengthen'd ship- voyage, wherein more than once the last hour had apparently arrived, and we seem'd certainly going down—yet reaching port in a sufficient way through all discomf1tures at last) — after completing my poems, I am curious to review them in the light of their own (at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions, with certain unfoldings of the thirty years they seek to embody. These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of firstpurposes and speculations, with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments. Results of seven or eight stages and struggles extending through nearly thirty years, (as I nigh my three-score-and-ten I live largely on memory,) 1 look upon Leaves of Grass, now fmish'd to the end of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive carte de visite to the coming generations of the New World, if I may assume to say so. That I have not gain'd the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future — anticipations — (" still lives the song, though Regnar dies")—that from a worldly and business point of view Leaves of Grass has been worse than a failur...« less