CodalSearch this book — or all of Codal…⌘K
nydus/Leaves of GrassPublic

The definitive collection of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

Page 112 of 508
Table of Contents

43

precisely the same, And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.

I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail.

It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried, Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side, Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again, Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall, Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder, Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d, nor the brutish koboo call’d the ordure of humanity, Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in, Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth, Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them, Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.

112