serenity. A sudden thought assails him, and his words are full of sadness, wet with tears, resonant with the echoes of funeral bells and drums:
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.[1]
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.[2]
But for him too come days of sadness:
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame …
All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.[3]
And when he contemplates the faces of those who sleep, he sees not only those of the happy, but
The wretched features of ennuyés, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists,
The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates.[4]
