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Down in Texas, the cotton-field, the negro-cabins—
drivers driving mules or oxen before rude carts
—cotton-bales piled on banks and wharves;
Encircling all, vast-darting, up and wide, the American
Soul, with equal hemispheres—one Love,
one Dilation or Pride;
In arriere, the peace-talk with the Iroquois, the
aborigines—the calumet, the pipe of good-will
arbitration, and indorsement,
The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun
and then toward the earth,
The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted
faces and guttural exclamations,
The setting out of the war-party—the long and
stealthy march,
The single file—the swinging hatchets—the surprise
and slaughter of enemies;
All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of These
States—reminiscences, all institutions,
All These States, compact—Every square mile of
These States, without excepting a particle—you
also—me also,
Me pleased, rambling in lanes and country fields,
Paumanok's fields,
Me, observing the spiral flight of two little yellow
butterflies, shuffling between each other, ascending
high in the air;
The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects—the
fall traveller southward, but returning northward
early in the spring;
The country boy at the close of the day, driving the
herd of cows, and shouting to them as they loiter
to browse by the road-side;