Imperturbability and Being

"... I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper'd little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don’t, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons—or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Folded and Hidden

"The greatest lessons of nature are the lessons of the fresh, eternal qualities of being: The variety and freedom, the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality—each toward all and nothing supersedes the rest;

That eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all nature; The indefinable hard something that is the old heroic stamina of nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, to proceed with single purpose toward the result necessitated, and for which the time has arrived.

...

What is nature but change, in all its visible, and still more its invisible processes? Nature keeps up her long and harmless throes, her vital, copious, eternal procession, An infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, and temperatures, and cross-purposes, Whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality

...
I fully believe in a clue and purpose in nature,

Enfolding itself all processes of growth,
effusing life and power, for hidden purposes.

The sun and stars that float in the open air,

The apple-shaped earth and we upon it,

Earth’s soil, trees, winds,

Waters that encompass us, tumultuous waves—

Surely the drift of them is something grand,

The purport of objective nature is doubtless folded, hidden, somewhere here;

I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
Nature, Containing All

Nearer and Farther

"All architecture is what you do to it
when you look upon it,

(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone?
or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you
when you are reminded by the instruments,

It is not the violins and the cornets,
it is not the oboe nor the beating drums,
nor the score of the baritone singer singing 

his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus,
nor that of the women's chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Leaves of Grass