3.As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Or as if I never deride myself! (O conscience-struck!
O self-convicted!)
Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly,
a long time, and never avow it ;)
Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in
myself, the stuff of wrong-doing,
Or as if it could cease transpiring from me until it must cease.
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17.
Of him I love day and night, I dreamed I heard he
was dead,
And I dreamed I went where they had buried him I
love—but he was not in that place,
And I dreamed I wandered, searching among burial-places,
to find him,
And I found that every place was a burial-place,
The houses full of life were equally full of death,
(This house is now,)
The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement,
the Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta,
were as full of the dead as of the living,
And fuller, O vastly fuller, of the dead than of the
living;
—And what I dreamed I will henceforth tell to every
person and age,
And I stand henceforth bound to what I dreamed;
And now I am willing to disregard burial-places, and
dispense with them,
