Samples of my Common-Place Book Walt Whitman

    I ought not to offer a record of these days, interests, recuperations, without including a certain old, well-thumb'd common-place book,{18} filled with favorite excerpts, I carried in my pocket for three summers, and absorb'd over and over again, when the mood invited. I find so much in having a poem or fine suggestion sink into me (a little then goes a great ways) prepar'd by these vacant-sane and natural influences.

    Endnotes:

    {18} Samples of my common-place book down at the creek:

    I have—says old Pindar—many swift arrows in my quiver which speak to the wise, though they need an interpreter to the thoughtless. Such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand. H. D. Thoreau.

    If you hate a man, don't kill him, but let him live.—Buddhistic. Famous swords are made of refuse scraps, thought worthless.

    Poetry is the only verity—the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal—and not after the apparent.—Emerson.

    The form of oath among the Shoshone Indians is, "The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?"

    The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of a man the country turns out.—Emerson.

            The whole wide ether is the eagle's sway:
            The whole earth is a brave man's fatherland.—Euripides.

            Spices crush'd, their pungence yield,
                Trodden scents their sweets respire;
            Would you have its strength reveal'd?
                Cast the incense in the fire.

    Matthew Arnold speaks of "the huge Mississippi of falsehood called History."