Title: Immortality was realized
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: After 1854
Whitman Archive ID: mid.00018
Source: Middlebury College Library, Special Collections. Transcribed from digital images of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the marginalia and annotations, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: Grier estimates that this was written between 1855 and 1856 (Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 5:1922).
Contributors to digital file: Lauren Grewe, Matt Cohen, and Nicole Gray
Immortality was realized—it ^the influence of the the thought of it entereding into the positive acts of the people citizens every day; —It livinges yet sending to us in its tangible bequest to modern ages—it rebukes it and lookings with calm features and rugged quaintness ^to day from the slopes out of the pyramids.—Personal qualities were accepted and obeyed:—as (When are they not accepted and obeyed?—) Through them ? Sesostris more than three thousand years ago ruled Egypt for sixty years more than three score years.—He was six feet ten inches high and nobly proportioned and supple.—He was considerate of the common people.— He conquered Asia and Europe, honoring most those people that resisted him most.— He was a rugged, and wholesome and masc and masculine person, and ^in the list of Egyptian greatness comes first in th after Osiris.—
Not only Assyria and Egypt— —not only Phœnicia and Lydia and Persia and Media and India——had their literature, growing out of the nature and circumstances ^and governments and enjoyments of the people, with ^mor or less specimens, of course ^long since lost of the grandests and most perfect
forms of composition ^expression——but ^the men and women other nation other empires and states, other mighty and populous cities, contemporary was with them in other parts of the world, or ^ages antecedent of them, perhaps it may be in distant regions of the eastern continent hemisphere, perhaps or it may be in North or South America, had their loves and passions and prides and aspirations also typified and put in shape and held.—in compositions.— Language was systematic and ^passed on from age one generation to another in methods fit for answering to what was needed.— These other nations unknown empires and cities, ^and their literatures are unknown by name existed just as certainly and with the known ones, and with perhaps most like a date yet they certainly existed ^in greater vigor and fluency than the known ones. Travelers in every age ^and in all parts of the world come upon their dumb and puzzling relics.—
—Hindostan