We should meet each new day with the same assumption: We can make each new day the best of days if we get the habit—the cultivation with resolute will of a cheerful temper. Preserve a cheerful mind, (and provide, in reason, for rain and snow,) and you can make it all go pretty well. That is the main part of getting along through the toil and battle of life—and it is a good deal habit.

In this life, which is itself a continual fight with some form of adversary or other, the aim should be to form that solid and adamantine fibre which will endure long and serious attacks upon it, and come out unharmed from them, rather than the ability to perform sudden and brilliant feats, which often exhaust the powers without doing any substantial good. The quality of being able to endure any quantity of blows and bruises, and hold out toughly under them, is what most tells.

Bold and strong invocation of suffering—
O the joy of suffering! To find how much one can stand!
He wins who can best stand grief.
So go your way unmoved—on and on to what you are required to do,
The rest will take care of itself,
By and by this thing will be settled for us—if we do not settle it ourselves.

We must be calm, but not too calm,
We must be resigned, but not too much so.
Men can be good or grand only of the consciousness of their supremacy within them,
Something in the soul that will not brook a challenge,
Which says, Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere,
Master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea,
Master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain,
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior soul impregnable.

I say to any man or woman,
These shows of the east and west are tame compared to you,
These furies, elements, storms, motions of nature, throes of apparent dissolution—
You are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over nature, elements, pain, passion.
Nothing that happens—no event, rencontre, weather, etc.—but it is confronted,
Nothing but is subdued into sustenance,
The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency—
Such is the marvellous transformation from the old timorousness and the old process of causes and effects.

Myself and mine gymnastic ever,
To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a boat, to manage horses,
And to hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea.

I, elate, saw with wonder, yet pensive and masterful, all the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me,
Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious,
Aplomb in the midst of irrational things, imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they.
I swear I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

I fancy I should take it very quietly if I found myself in the midst of a desperate conflict. I never get nervous. In crises, I never was disturbed or gave out any consciousness of danger—as, indeed, I did not feel it. It has always been so; it is a part of my ancestral quality.

O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do,
They are so placid and self-contained, teaching content;
One must be contained within himself or herself—otherwise the world is all in vain.

O for the swiftness and balance of fishes,
I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for themselves, and I am not to be enough for myself.
O to have the feeling today or any day, I am sufficient as I am!
(The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent.)

Must all then amount to but this?
Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?
And yet it is enough, O soul,
O soul, we have positively appear’d—that is enough.

I exist as I am, that is enough,
Enough merely to be! enough merely to live! enough to breathe!
To be at all—what is better than that?
To be is just as great as to perceive or tell,
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know that he has enough.

My immediate acquaintances, even those attached strongly to me, secretly entertain the idea that I am a great fool not to “make something” out of my talents and out of the general good will with which I am regarded. Can it be that some such notion is lately infusing itself into me also?
The world goes daffy after phantom great men. I don’t seem to like that sort of attention myself. I always did shrink both from getting into a great light and from being a great light.

Epictetus’ “Description of a Wise Man”:
He never speaks of himself,
He is indifferent whether he be thought foolish or wise.
If anyone reproves or insults him he looks with care that it does not irritate him,
If anyone praises him, in his own mind he condemns the flatterer.

So I say to my own greatness, Away! I have no wish to lift myself above breathing air, and be specially eminent or attractive—I am not quite such a fool as that.

I always seem to know what to do with failure, but success is a puzzle to me. I wouldn’t know what to do, how to comport myself, if I lived long enough to become accepted, to get in demand, to ride the crest of the wave. I would have to go scratching, questioning, to see if this was the real critter, the old Walt Whitman—to see if Walt Whitman had not suffered a destructive transformation—reconciled to the conventions, subdued from the old independence.

The real art is the art of succeeding by not trying to succeed. If you have the real stuff in you, you’ve got to wait for it to be recognized, and you are far more likely to die than to live in waiting.

I often think of myself compensated for simplicity, obscurity—
I get peace, satisfaction, deepest joy,
So I will no more trouble myself about recognition,
Not take the position of one wanting compliments,
(This must be real, because if the wanting compliments exist it will show out somehow.)
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me.

Outline sketch of a superb calm character:
His emotions are complete in himself irrespective of whether his friendship, etc., are returned or not,
His analogy is the earth, complete in itself,
He grows, blooms, like some perfect tree or flower in nature,
Whether viewed by admiring eyes, or in some wild or wood entirely unknown.

No first-class fellow wishes to be flattered, aureoled, set upon a throne,
But craves to be understood, to be appreciated for his immediate active present power.
I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait,
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,
(Poets, inventors, knowers, must themselves make the only growth through which they shall become appreciated.)
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself;
I see that the elementary laws do not get excited and run and bawl to vindicate themselves,
The doctors might all deny the attraction of gravity, and that sublime power would never complain.

The great elementary laws take and effuse without argument, and never apologize—
I am of the same style, for I am their friend,
I love them quits and quits.
Be you like the grand elemental powers—
Settle your case with yourself—then go ahead.

NEXT: DOUBT AND DESPAIR

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).