After all not to create only, or found only,
But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,

To fill the: gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,
Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,
To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,
These also are the lessons of our New World;
While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

Long and long has the grass been growing,
Long and long has the rain been falling,
Long has the globe been rolling round.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter, of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings,
Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and on Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you."

- stanzas 1-2, "Song of the Exposition", 1871; from Leaves of Grass
- Comprehensive Reader's Edition; Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley ed.;
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1965

Walt Whitman