Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day;

The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme--myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme:

The similitudes of the past, and those of the future;

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings--on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;

The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;   10

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;

The certainty of others--the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling

back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails not;            20

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;

I project myself--also I return-- l am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;

Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright

- Walt Whitman