I depart as air .... I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt … - Walt Whitman

"We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say they are not divine,
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you."

-from "A Song of Occupations"

Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.