Tag Archives: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman on variety and freedom

Walt Whitman

As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress. If a man were ask’d, for instance, the distinctive points contrasting modern European and American political and other life with the old Asiatic cultus, as lingering-​bequeath’d yet in China and Turkey, he might find the amount of them in John Stuart Mill’s profound essay on Liberty in the future, where he demands two main constituents, or sub-​strata, for a truly grand nationality—1st, a large variety of character—and 2d, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions—

Democratic Vistas (1871) by Walt Whitman