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The genuine miracles of Christ

About This Item

  • Title: The genuine miracles of Christ
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.01019
  • Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This cancelled prose manuscript was probably written between 1850 and 1855. Language in the manuscript was used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in the poem that was eventually titled "Song of Myself." Segments of the manuscript also resemble language that appeared in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass and in the 1856 "Poem of Perfect Miracles," later titled "Miracles." The wording of "the vast elemental sympathy, which, only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods," was used, slightly revised, in "A Song of Joys," which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "Poem of Joys."
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The genuine miracles of Christ." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.01019.xml (TEI)

Key

Textual Feature Appearance
Overwritten brown with strikethrough
Added inline purple with double underline
Uncertain gray with wavy underline
Supplied from another source turquoise with brackets
Metamark green with triple underline
Long deletion gray background with top and bottom border
  [begin leaf 1 recto]

The genuine miracles of Christ were such miracles as can always be produced.—They come from something which ne whose perfume neither originated with that fragrant lily of souls, nor was exhausted by him.—They are not more wonderful, eExcept that their law spirit encloses all the others—they are not more wonderful marvellous than any of those mysteries we call the laws of the Its nature; and all alike are just the same this hour in the Atlantic states and the valleys of the west, as tens of centuries ago in ^media Palestine or ^in Egypt (Shinar)? Forever and forever ^the one of them, and and that Jesus knew, saw, is the immortal testifier of Love the semen whence comes ^comes is born of the entire Universe., ^the one showing If shows itself in ^and cause of this that vast elemental sympathy, which, of all we yet know, only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods, best visible shown to the world through a superbly transparent and perfect nature, a sweet and clean body in which was is no guile, or any thing selfish or unseemly occult or mean.—Every hour, every atom, every where is chock with beautiful miracles, but I consider the ^sympathetic power of the affections of the human men's and women's hearts to be ^ the nighest of all ^we yet know ^we can behold with mortal eyes to the primal source and ^unfathomable depth of all we we do not ^yet know. Noro god nor demigod of the antique—no power of Kronos, or Zeus his son or Hercules his grandson, begins with such a power as this.—Of the being who embodies it in boundless finished perfection,—and of whom there have been one or two examples in as many thousand years, as if to encourage the earth and show it how,—and of whose presence to say it is divine I do not wonder,—things more incredible than the any myths of Jah, or Brahma, or Osiris, descend from the tips of his fingers, from the smell of his body, from the vapor of his lungs, whether they act to day ^or fifty generations gone,—whether in Asia, or in New York or San Francisco, or London.—For a soul

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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