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134
Leaves of Grass.

When he or she appears, materials are overawed,
The dispute on the Soul stops,
The old customs and phrases are confronted, turned
back, or laid away.

13. What is your money-making now? What can it do
now?
What is your respectability now?
What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions,
statute-books now?
Where are your jibes of being now?
Where are your cavils about the Soul now?

14. Was that your best? Were those your vast and
solid?
Riches, opinions, politics, institutions, to part obediently
from the path of one man or woman!
The centuries, and all authority, to be trod under
the foot-soles of one man or woman!

15. —A sterile landscape covers the ore—there is as
good as the best, for all the forbidding appearance,
There is the mine, there are the miners,
The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplished,
the hammers-men are at hand with their tongs
and hammers,
What always served and always serves, is at hand.

16. Than this nothing has better served—it has served
all,
Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek,
and long ere the Greek,