First to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,
The past! the past! the past!

While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand.

Still, while memories subtly play, the past is vivid as ever,
Perhaps the best of songs heard, or of any and all true love, or life’s fairest episodes, is the résumé of them long afterwards, looking at the actualities away back past,
The wanderings as in dreams—the meditation of old times resumed.
(I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and your times.)

What is the present after all but a growth out of the past, the legitimate birth of the past?
As a projectile form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,
So the present is utterly form’d, impell’d by the past—
The law of the past cannot be eluded.

Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating,
Each result and glory retracing itself and nestling close, always obligated—
As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,
The countless years drawing themselves onward and arrived at these years,
Curious years each emerging from that which preceded it,
The many issuing cycles from their precedent minute.

People think an event consists of itself alone,
But what event is there but involves a thousand elements scarcely dreamed of?
No consummation exists without being from some long previous consummation, and that from some other,
Without the farthest conceivable one coming a bit nearer the beginning than any.
What growth or advent is there that does not date back, back, until lost­­­­—perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost—in the receding horizons of the infinite greatness of the past?
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
The dark unfathom’d retrospect—the teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows! 

I look inward upon myself, I look around upon our own times, and how can I complain of the past?
Shall I denounce my own ancestry, the very ground under my feet that has been so long building?
I do not condemn either the past or the present,
Of present and past, I do not blame them for doing what they have done and are doing,
I know that they are and were what they could not but be.
I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And that they could no-how have been better than they were,
And that today is what it must be, and could no-how be better.

No doubt it’s all just as well as it is,
It all came about according to what they used to describe as the ordinances of God—
There’s no chance in it,
And each of us is inevitable,
It is as useless to quarrel with history as with the weather—
But we can prepare for the weather and prepare for history.

The study of history offers claims to all men, which are perhaps superior to the claims of any other study. I find I can write, master, cope with affairs fifty years old better than with those occurring now. I get more completely the sense of proportion.

But my experience with life makes me afraid of the historian. The historian, if not a liar himself, is largely at the mercy of liars. A good deal that gets written once is repeated and repeated, until the future comes to swear by it as gospel, passing traditions and exaggerations down from one generation to another unquestioned. After a while we begin to think even the lies must be true. It is a lamentable twist in history.
The thing to have is the truth. Only in an adherence to this is the safety of history. 

To judge of history as if all could be expressed in one person! All along in history all sorts of stories have been fathered, mothered, in celebres. They are considered safer when you have given them some individual to nestle in. But after a man disappears, the mists begin to gather, then fallacy of one degree or another, then utter myth, irresistibly mystifying everything.

I often reflect how very different every fellow must have been from the fellow we come upon in the myths, with the surroundings, the incidents, the push and pull of the concrete moment, all left out or wrongly set forth. It is hard to extract a man’s real self—any man—from such a chaotic mass, from such historical debris. So I am very impatient of stories which imply the concentration of all historical meanings in single eminent persons. 

Could a truthful history of anything, of any individual, be told? While I accept the records, I think we know very little of the actual. By far the greatest part of the old statistics of history are only approaches to the truth and are often discrepant and suspicious.
The best and most important part of history cannot be told,
It eludes being examined or printed,
It is above even dates and reliable information—
The best poetry is the real history.

NEXT:  THE FUTURE

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).