Even the tiniest things are miraculous:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars …
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.[1]
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward.[2]
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.[3]
Thus Whitman’s soul is almost always joyous. At certain moments his physical and spiritual delight in the spectacle of the world transports him into a well-nigh Dionysiac frenzy. Read, for instance, the Song of Joys, wherein all joys from that of “bathing in the swimming bath” to the “prophetic joys of better” are enumerated and invoked.
