mantle. A quarter of a century earlier, Henry David Thoreau had devel-
oped a heroic simile that might have intrigued Whitman by linking Co-
lumbus and a vision of immortality. In lamenting the deaths of a shipload
of poor Irish emigrants who perished in 1849 when their ship foundered
approaching the American shore and whom he was unable to help rescue,
Thoreau wrote:
Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but
the worms and ¤shes. Their owners were coming to the New
World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did—they were within a
mile of its shores; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated
to a newer world than Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose
existence we believe that there is far more universal and convinc-
ing evidence—though it has not yet been discovered by science—
than Columbus had of this: not merely mariners’ tales and some
paltry drift-wood and sea-weed, but a continental drift and in-
stinct to all our shores. I saw their empty hulks come to land; but
they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet far-
ther west, toward which we are all tending and which we shall
reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did.
No doubt, we have reason to thank God that they have not been
“shipwrecked into life again.”Thoreau’s observation, that “it is hard to part with one’s body, but, no
doubt, it is easy enough to do without it once it is gone,” anticipates Whit-
man’s poetic reference to the “excrementious” body, said to be sloughed
off at death; and Thoreau’s prediction that these Irish dead will ¤nd a new
land in “halcyon days” and “kiss the shore in rapture there” anticipates
Whitman’s many poems celebrating the soul’s voyage to the uncharted
regions. Thoreau’s reference to “a continental drift and instinct” indicates
that he, like Whitman, assumes that the best argument for an afterlife is
the supposedly universal sentiment in its favor.^27
The identi¤cation of Columbus with Whitman seemed only natural
to the poet and to his friends. After reading an installment of Democratic
Vistas, Bronson Alcott wrote Whitman a letter in which he called the
poet “the American Columbus, whose sagacity has thus sounded adven-
turously the sea of our Social Chaos and anchored his thought serenely
in the newly discovered Atlantides about which the Grecian Plato died
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 219