Unnamed Land Walt Whitman

Nations ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten
        thousand years before these States,
Garner'd clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and
travel'd their course and pass'd on,
What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes
        and nomads,
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,
What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology,
What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death
        and the soul,
Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and
        undevelop'd,
Not a mark, not a record remains—and yet all remains.

O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more
        than we are for nothing,
I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much
        as we now belong to it.

Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,
Some with oval countenances learn'd and calm,
Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects,
Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,
        laboring, reaping, filling barns,
Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
        libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.
Are those billions of men really gone?
Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?
Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves?