States,” “the stalwart and well-shaped heir” of all predecessor bards.^24
Hermes’s allusion in the above passage to “the celestial sphere where
every one goes in his turn” is decidedly romantic. For although Greek
gods, whenever they chose, could return to the “celestial spheres” that
were reserved for their exclusive use, the Greek masses dreaded the pros-
pect of what they believed to be a shadowy, joyless existence in the after-
life.^25 Those “celestial spheres where every one goes in his turn” are more
compatible with Whitman’s or Bryant’s democratic imagery of death as
the peaceful transition from life than with anything that might have ap-
pealed to most ancient Greeks.
The ¤rst ten sections of “Salut au Monde!” (in the ¤nal edition) are
largely composed of anaphoric, ¤rst-person lines (more than eighty of
them beginning with the words, “I see”) in which the persona records his
impressions during his far-ranging mental journey. In sections 11 and
12, which conclude the poem, the persona, having circumnavigated the
globe, is back on American soil and salutes “all the inhabitants of the
earth,” seemingly without distinction, and delivers a sermon to them.
He extends his democratic greetings to all people—prisoners, scoundrels,
“the menials of the earth,” slaves and slave masters, helpless women and
children, and “the male and female everywhere,” although one may sense
a touch of Anglo-European pride in his singling out for the highest
praise the “brotherhood,” “constructiveness,” and “industry of my race.”
He names dozens of lands and cities, wishing their inhabitants “health to
you! good will to you all, from me and America sent!” Wherever they may
be and whoever they may be, he assures them, they participate in the
same essential divinity:
Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon
the earth,
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.Although he proclaims a belief in universal advancement, the persona
offers the darker-skinned peoples—including the “uncouth” Bedouins,
the “plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kabul, Cairo,” Mexican pe-
ons, dwellers in the Arctic regions, the “Hottentot with clicking palate,”
the “wooly-hair’d hordes,” and the “human faces with the fathomless
114 / “The Progress of Souls”