I have made a movement and change of base. I find myself thrown amidst a mild, pleasant society, really intellectual, conversing in earnest on profound subjects, in a kind and conciliatory manner. I do not despise the intellectual—far from it—it has its uses. Conversation is one of the most delicious stimulants which life affords. It is all first-rate, good and smart—but too constrained and bookish for a free old hawk like me.

I waste no ink, nor my throat, on the ever-deploying armies of professors, authors, lawyers, teachers,
Of them we expect that they be very learned and nothing more.
Erudition is low among the glories of humanity,
There is something in vast erudition melancholy and fruitless as an Arctic sea,
With most men it is a slow dream, dreamed in a moving fog,
For my part when I meet anyone of erudition I want to get away—It terrifies me.

What I object to in so much that we call education, culture, scholarship, is that it seems to invest its avatars with contempt for elemental qualities in character. The most learned scholars are often the most melancholy men in the world. All our intellectual people obey the authorities, settle disputes by the old tests, keep out of rain and sun, retreat to the shelter of houses and schools.
There is something cold, something lacking—a failure to satisfy the deepest emotions of the soul—a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which the old exaltés and poets supply, and which the keenest modern philosophers so far do not.

When I was a young man one of my placards for everyday contemplation was this:
To guard lest I settle into the mood of the scholars, critics,
To not take a severe view of things,
Growling at the universe in general and all its particulars.
(I think I have mainly succeeded in holding myself in check, if check were needed.)

I consider it the bane of the universities, colleges, that they withhold, withdraw, men from direct, drastic contact with life. As between a university course and a struggle of the right sort in the quick of everyday life, the life course would beat the university course every time.
The best things escape, skip, the universities. The university is only contemporary at best; it goes, but not in advance. It is never prophetic; often, indeed, has its eyes set in the back of its head.

The theories of the schools and governments and religions all have something noble and true, all and every one of them. But knowledge and sciences, however important, are branches, radiations only, each one relative. Not the best that ever was built or ever will be built on earth can stand as the final destination of man.
The ambition for universal knowledge always is a vain ambition, already carried to extravagant lengths and tainting the schools. No philosophy possibly can, in deepest analysis, explain the universe.

Mocking all the textbooks and professor’s expositions and proofs and diagrams, stand or lie millions of all the most beautiful and common facts—
The fact is greater than anything we can say about the fact.
The least insect, the eyesight, motion, baffle us,
To glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times;
Take here the mainest lesson—less from books—less from the schools.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till I look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Powerful persons, and the first inventors and poets of the earth, never come from the depths of the schools—never.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, (but never forgotten,)
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
(Oh damnation! damnation! Thy other name is school-teaching.)

I conn’d old times, I sat studying at the feet of the great masters,
Studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
The lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato—
Now if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study me,
That I eat and drink is spectacle enough for the great authors and schools.

Beginning my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much—
The mere fact of consciousness, the power of motion, the senses, eyesight, love—
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
From my voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things with man.

NEXT: THE UNIVERSE

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).