Title: Assyria & Egypt
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1855 and 1860
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00692
Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Transcribed from digital images of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the marginalia and annotations, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note(s): At one point, this manuscript likely formed part of Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook.
Contributors to digital file: Lauren Grewe, Nicole Gray, Ty Alyea, Matt Cohen, and Kevin McMullen
Paste-on | | Whitman's Notes on Paste-on | | Whitman's Highlighting on Paste-on | | Erasure | | Overwrite |
Assyria & Egypt |
illustrating the aesthetic and intellectual developements of our race, in fluency, poems, the beautiful, in theory and action, ^in friendship, architecture, manners and so on, philosophy, and much else.
—the physical, that which [guides?]makes ^a commanding and mighty race, mastership, rudeness,—that which gives a great perfection to war, conquest, invasions, audacity, amplitude, victory, the majesty ^& discriminations of law, the dignityfied of ^in attitude, speech, and the like
Where does India come in? Before? see preceding leaf
the spiritual element, the indefinite, the immortal, ^sublimity, the realm of that to which the material tends, the realm of shadows, meditation, the influence of the stars in solitude at night, the ^sublime idea of a coming sav man or saviour, a perfect individual
More or less, ^undoubtedly in India ^in Hindustan, Egypt, Assyria, Persia China Phoenicia, and other lands, elder lands, Doubtless much preceded the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews— But what preceded themse ^latter is hard to tell except from by the process of reasoning from effects to causes——Egypt, Assyria, India, Phoenicia, China.