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Home  »  Prose Works  »  243. The Great Unrest of Which We Are Part

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Prose Works. 1892.

I. Specimen Days

243. The Great Unrest of Which We Are Part

MY thoughts went floating on vast and mystic currents as I sat to-day in solitude and half-shade by the creek—returning mainly to two principal centres. One of my cherish’d themes for a never-achiev’d poem has been the two impetuses of man and the universe—in the latter, creation’s incessant unrest, exfoliation, (Darwin’s evolution, I suppose.) Indeed, what is Nature but change, in all its visible, and still more its invisible processes? Or what is humanity in its faith, love, heroism, poetry, even morals, but emotion?