I am become the poet of babes and little things,
For me children and the begetters of children,
The children, we love them—we do—Oh yes! tenderly!

What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
The sacred parturition scene—
To his work without flinching the obstetrician comes,
I see the elderhand pressing receiving supporting,
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape—
A baby safely born out of the mother’s womb.

The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child,
A happy mother birth’d a perfect child.

Who are the infants, some playing, some slumbering?
The wonderful new babies! The wonderful alluring babies! the latent unrealized baby-days,
The merriment of the twin babes that crawl over the grass in the sun,
And pass in the creeping trance of a couple of summers and winters to articulate and walk,
The mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them.
The sacred faces of infants—the silent old-faced infants—
How instinctive they are! How they divine us—expose us!

I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,
The mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt,
The sleeping mother and babe—hush’d, I study them long and long.
Or on his father’s lap a young boy fallen asleep,
How his lips move! How he smiles in his sleep!
The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man.

His own parents, he that had father’d him and she that had conceiv’d him in her womb and birth’d him,
They gave this child more of themselves than that,
They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.

How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles endlessly rocking,
How solemn they look there, stretch’d and still.
The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

It used to be my delight to get the very young ones,
Take them in my arms, walk them—often sing to them—hours and hours and hours,
Oh! how fully I have entered into them!
(Generally, in the first year or two, the babies fear me, but they get bravely over that.)

The baby, very fine and bright, is an unfailing delight and diversion to me,
The young one knows me so well, and is never so happy as when I am tending him,
I don’t know who got the most joy out of it—
It seems to me the baby’s could never have equalled mine.

Knowst thou the excellent joys of youth?
What bloom more than the bloom of youth?
The friendly boys that pass’d,
The most courageous and friendly young men,
The affectionate boy, happy alone by some wood edge,
The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,
The boy’s longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming—
These sparkling eyes, this face of a healthy honest boy, is the programme of all good.

Truly, life is sweet to the young man,
In the simple house of his childhood, with the well-known neighbors and faces,
Such bounding and swelling capacities for joy reside within him, and such ambitious yearnings.
Health and unfettered spirits are his staff and mantle,
He learns unthinkingly to love—that glorious privilege of youth!
Out of the tiny fractions of his experience, he builds beautiful imaginings, with the confidence and gayety of a child,
And confidently looks for the future to realize them—he is so sure of those future years.

There’s a certain allowance of deviltry in all boys. But let them go on—don’t interfere with them. Boys could not get along without that. Given a chance, they would develop the heroic and manly. But they will be spoiled by civilization, religion, and the damnable conventions. Their parents will want them to grow up genteel, and thus their heroic qualities will be simply crushed out of them.
Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age! But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain, pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.

Give me a perfect child, a little innocent child,
The student, boy or girl,
The barefoot boy and girl, led forward to be taught;
By twos and threes, young people, hundreds concentring,
Walk the paths and streets and roads, toward a tall-domed school.
Only a public school?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a lot of boys and girls?
Ah more, infinitely more,
The attentive, quiet children, these stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the soul’s voyage.
How far more deeply children think than most people imagine,
Innocent young ideas—their perceptions, intuitions, are keen enough—but capricious, too.

No investment is so sure for family or state as the never-enough-praised spread of common education—an investment in developing, shaping, perfecting the young body and mind.
Let knowledge and virtue and elegance and peace linger in these cheerful and attractive halls—great ideas, not taught in sermons but imbibed as health is imbibed, sinking into the minds of the boys and girls, and young men and young women, in multitudes of beautiful associations and reminiscences that life with all its changes shall never be able to erase.

But the present style of education is all wrong. Probably the best education never undertakes to finish or crown, but only to disencumber and prepare the way, so that all is afterward admitted in its due proportions and assimilated and digested, and the seeds of observation and experience and study become fruitful.
Children should first develop physically, they should learn to love nature, become familiar with nature, get into harmony with nature’s laws, absorb sunshine and air.

An old man’s thought of school:
The school has been considered mainly for childhood, but that is a mistake. The true school is for grown persons, middle-aged, old-aged, none excepted. A perfect system of education should comprehend all folk, of every  age, lighting the study of man, the soul, health, immortality, government—nothing too close, nothing too far off—the stars not too far off. 
There’s a day of reckoning ahead, then we’ll have more schools or no schools—schools from bottom to top for all, or for none.

Behold children at their sports—joy of the wide-breath’d games,
O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity!
The vivacity that always resides in young veins,
The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips, shoulders young and strong,
Movements, postures ahead of any sculpture.
Fierce and athletic girls,
The tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls with girlish laughter—
I say a girl fit for these states must be free, capable, dauntless, just the same as a boy.

Can we not learn from the observation of children, what a surplus of bodily vigor joy can give?
Had men more play, they too would be full from within of animal spirits.
I like the men who are glad they are boys—the men who remain boys—
Why should any man ever give up being a boy?

I join a group of children; watching, I pause aside with them,
I sit here where I can see the children at play beneath the green leaves,
I see young children—the cheeriest things on earth,
I hear their tones of loud and reckless mirth, and many a clear and flute-like laugh,
The happy childhood, laughter of young people, voices, calls, responses,
The prattled yearning of children that gambol and play.

A group of little children with their ways and chatter flow in—talkative young ones to those that like them—
Like welcome rippling water o’er my heated nerves and flesh.
Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake,
Who knows but after all the youth are my natural friends?
What am I after all but a child?

I am that half-grown angry boy, fallen asleep,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
The tears of foolish passion yet undried upon my cheeks,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing.
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears.

Once I, the child leaving his bed, a curious boy,
Wander’d alone, dimly down to the beach gliding,
Bareheaded, barefoot, the wind wafting my hair,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
Cautiously peering, I heard at intervals the he-bird.

I hear your notes, I hear your call, O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul, O wondrous singer! you only I hear,
I come presently, I understand you—
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
He pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know,
The rest might not, but I have treasur’d every note.

I, a child, listen’d long and long, listen’d to keep,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
The charm of the carol rapt me,
And the echo arous’d in my soul, the voice of my spirit, tallied the song of the bird,
I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping,
Now absorbing, translating, the aria’s meaning swiftly depositing,
To sing the tallying chant, loud human song,
Whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

Now in a moment I know what I am for,
I awake, and already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, a thousand warbling echoes, have started to life within me.
My own songs awaked from that hour, the thousand responsive songs at random,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, to the outsetting bard,
The messenger there arous’d, the myriad thence-arous’d words, the notes of the bird continuous echoing.
O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, now translating,
Never more shall I cease perpetuating you.

O to go back to the place where I was born,
O to hear the birds sing once more,
I felt it all as positively then in my young days as I do now in my old ones—
The fire, the sweet hell within, the unknown want, the destiny of me,
Begun in ripen’d youth and steadily pursued, never to die.

More and more do I see that it is with the young man, the young woman, that there lies the future of “Leaves of Grass”—that its real constituency will be these newer personalities.
And you America,
Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?
To girlhood, boyhood look.
But you can have healthy and powerful breeds of children on no less terms than these of mine;
Follow me and there shall be taller and nobler crops of humanity on the earth.

NEXT:  OLD AGE

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