Affection that will not be gainsayed….The sense of what is real….the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of daytime and the doubts of nighttime…the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so….Or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets . . if they are not flashes and specks what are they?

Walt Whitman, “There Was a Child Went Forth”, in Leaves of Grass