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Silence.—^Years ago In the Parsons affair, in New York, after the Mayor Westervelt had been worsted, a vast mass of ten or some ten to fifteen thousand, after hearing P., on Sunday afternoon, took a freak into their heads to adjourn visit in perfect silence the Mayor's house, as a rebuke.—They did so; ^—only the tramping of their feet was heard— a prodigious army drawing up and standing around there his door, and neighborhood, without a word or any insulting gesture or look, for about half an hour, and then dispersed.—
Parts of this section may be related to the poem that would later be titled "Great Are the Myths": "Expression of speech . . in what is written or said forget not that silence is also expressive, / That anguish as hot as the hottest and contempt as cold as the coldest may be without words" (1855, p. 94). The poem went through many revisions through the different editions of Leaves of Grass, then was permanently dropped in 1881–1882, except the two couplets that became the poem "Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night."
Silence.—(The original god ^of whom Osiris ^was one type, in his highest capacity of goodness, was adored by the Egyptian priests in silence,—without words, without movements.—)