Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1855

Historian! you who celebrate bygones! You have explored the outward, the surface of the races-the life that has exhibited itself, You have treated man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers, and priests; But now I also, arriving, contribute something: I, an habitue of the Alleghanies, treat man as he is in the influences of Nature, in himself, in his own inalienable rights, Advancing, to give the spirit and the traits of new Democratic ages, myself, personally, (Let the future behold them all in me-Me, so puzzling and contradictory-Me, a Manhattanese, the most loving and arrogant of men;) I do not tell the usual facts, proved by records and