After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or perma… - Walt Whitman

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.

I HAVE said somewhere that the three Presidentiads preceding 1861 show’d how the weakness and wickedness of rulers are just as eligible here in America under republican, as in Europe under dynastic influences. But what can I say of that prompt and splendid wrestling with secession slavery, the arch-enemy personified, the instant he unmistakably show’d his face? The volcanic upheaval of the nation, after that firing on the flag at Charleston, proved for certain something which had been previously in great doubt, and at once substantially settled the question of disunion. In my judgment it will remain as the grandest and most encouraging spectacle yet vouchsafed in any age, old or new, to political progress and democracy. It was not for what came to the surface merely — though that was important — but what it indicated below, which was of eternal importance. Down in the abysms of New World humanity there had form’d and harden’d a primal hard-pan of national Union will, determin’d and in the majority, refusing to be tamper’d with or argued against, confronting all emergencies, and capable at any time of bursting all surface bonds, and breaking out like an earthquake.

Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else — not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am;
Some are baffled — But that one is not — that one knows me.

Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.