I am the poet of reality,
I say that all the things seen are real.
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea,
And went down to reconnoiter there a long time, and bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense everyone,
And that what they seem to the child they are,
And the world is no joke,
Nor any part of it a sham,
For God does not joke,
Nor is there any sham in the universe.

I announce myself the poet of materials and exact demonstration,
I guess I am mainly sensitive to the wonderfulness and perhaps spirituality of things in their physical and concrete expressions—
There is a great deal of heavenly enjoyment in this world that quite attracts my attention from anything in the world to come,
And I believe I shall find nothing in the stars more majestic and beautiful than I have already found on the earth,
Not more spiritual, not more divine than this earth.

I accept reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing—
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
All the things seen or demonstrated are so.

These are the philosophers of nature,
Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring, triumphantly moving,
Traveling, sailing, measuring space,
Botanizing, dissecting, or making machines,
Advanced, in grandeur and reality, analyzing everything,
Every one admirable and serene.

Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, they stand for realities—all is as it should be.
And yet they are not my dwelling,
I, who holds duly his triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling, my realities.
Realism is mine—my miracles,
The rapt promises and lumine of seers, the spiritual world,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real but not yet seen;
What else is so real as mine?

I believe that much unseen is also here,
(How can the ultimate reality of visible things be visible?)
I see no object, no expression, no animal, no tree, no art, no book, but I see, from morning to night, and from night to morning, the spiritual;
In every object, mountain, tree, and star, in every birth and life,
A mystic cipher waits infolded—the indefinite, the immortal, sublimity.

How it is I know not, but I often realize a presence—in clear moods I am certain of it—
An unknown sphere more real than I dream’d, more direct, darts awakening rays about me,
Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me,
Contact daily and hourly that will not release me.

The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents.
What is all our material knowledge compared to the vast oceanic volume of unknown spiritual facts, the immensity of unknown being and facts around us of which we cannot possibly take any cognizance?
Neither chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will give the least explanation,
Soft doctrine is as steady help as stable doctrine.

O spirituality of things!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings,
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.
From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves living beings—
Separate countless free identities, now doubtless near us in the air, that we know not of—
And now would impart the same secretly to me.
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

There’s a spiritual side of the simplest physical phenomena—not only a spiritual side, more than that—a spiritual outcome.
As in the long chain of endless development and growth in the physical world,
So in the ethereal world an endless spiritual procession of growth,
Entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law—
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening,
The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain,
All these shows to form and give identity and character to the spiritual identity, the real being, which is immortal.
If the spiritual is not behind the material, to what purpose is the material?

I chant materials emanating spirituality,
Celebrate the unknown, the future hidden spiritual world—the real reality.
Sure as the earth swims through the heavens,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results!
Invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through time,
Out of apparent materialism, an unerring spirituality always and certainly emerges.

True, we must not condemn the show, neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensability of its meanings;
But how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we can already conceive of superior and spiritual points of view, and, palpable as it seems under present relations, it all and several might, nay certainly would, fall apart and vanish.

Have you no thought, O dreamer, of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Hast never come to thee an hour, a sudden gleam divine,
The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal—
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks,
(Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they?)—
Precipitating, bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth,
These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours—
To utter nothingness?

Have you no thought that the conventional theories of life, worldly ambition, wealth, office, fame, etc., are essentially but glittering mayas, delusions?
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
I suspect all is but a pageant,
For there is a strange unreality about our lives here. What is it but a phantasm?

Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul,
That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts, non-realities,
That maybe the things I perceive are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions.
Fear not, my brethren, my sisters, to sound out that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision’d soul—illusions! apparitions! figments all!

Mrs. Hatch says that first exists the spirituality of anything, and that gives existence to things. But Andrew Jackson Davis puts matter as the primary source of all results. Both are quite determined in their theories. Perhaps when they know much more, both of them will be much less determined.

I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true, I reject no part,
I help myself to material and immaterial,
(No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.)
When I see where the east is greater than the west—where the sound man’s part of the child is greater than the sound woman’s part—or where a father is more needful than a mother to produce me—then I guess I shall see how spirit is greater than matter;
I know that I cannot separate them.

Most writers have disdained the physical world, and they have not overestimated the other, or soul, but have underestimated the corporeal;
I preserve the equilibrium of the truth that the material world, and all its laws, are as grand and superb as the spiritual world and all its laws.
The physical and the sensuous retain holds upon me which are never entirely releas’d,
And those holds I have not only not denied, but hardly wish’d to weaken.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,
I will not praise one without the other.
How shall my eye separate the beauty of the blossoming buckwheat field from the stalks and heads of tangible matter?
How shall I know what the life is except as I see it in the flesh?
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
You furnish your parts toward the soul,
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual.

Matter and spirit are held together by a central and never-broken unity,
One consistent and eternal purpose.
There is a phase of the real, lurking behind the real, which it is all for,
The material is all for the spiritual—they curiously blend—bodies are all spiritual—
And the spiritual, most of all known to my sense, is for the body—and they also blend—
Melange mine own,
Wondrous interplay between the unseen and the seen. 

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