I see vapors exhaling from unexplored countries, I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poison’d splint, the fetish, and the obi.
I see African and Asiatic towns, I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuktu, Monrovia, I see the swarms of Peking, Canton, Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, Tokyo, I see the Kruman in his hut, and the Dahoman and Ashantee-man in their huts, I see the Turk smoking opium in Aleppo, I see the picturesque crowds at the fairs of Khiva and those of Herat, I see Teheran, I see Muscat and Medina and the intervening sands, I see the caravans toiling onward, I see Egypt and the Egyptians, I see the pyramids and obelisks, I look on chisell’d histories, records of conquering kings, dynasties, cut in slabs of sand-stone, or on granite-blocks, I see at Memphis mummy-pits containing mummies embalm’d, swathed in linen cloth, lying there many centuries, I look on the fall’n Theban, the large-ball’d eyes, the side-drooping neck, the hands folded across the breast.
I see all the menials of the earth, laboring,
I see all the prisoners in the prisons,
I see the defective human bodies of the earth, * The blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics, * The pirates, thieves, betrayers, murderers, slave-makers of the earth, * The helpless infants, and the helpless old men and women.
I see male and female everywhere, I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs, I see the constructiveness of my race, I see the results of the perseverance and industry of my race, I see ranks, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, I go among them, I mix indiscriminately, And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.