Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, The making of perfect soldiers. - Walt Whitman

We seem afraid of the natural forces. John Burroughs puts it well, says, if the American is only dry, he is not content to take a drink of pure cold water, but must put sugar into it, or a flavor. To me, these things — the things of which these are the type — are the prominent dangers in the future of our America. The exhilaration of such freedom — the going and coming — the being master of yourself and of the road! No one who is not a walker can begin to know it! Oh! the long, long walks, way into the nights! — in the after hours — sometimes lasting till two or three in the morning! The air, the stars, the moon, the water — what a fullness of inspiration they imparted! — what exhilaration! And there were the detours, too — wanderings off into the country out of the beaten path: I remember one place in Maryland in particular to which we would go. How splendid, above all, was the moon — the full moon, the half moon: and then the wonder, the delight, of the silences.

I lean and loaf at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass.

Beautiful dripping fragments — the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to call them to me, or think of them,
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry