Dear Dick, 
I have just been staying in the Njàl country. I gather the Nazis look on that sort of life as the cradle of all the virtues. The enclosed laws and regulations seem so dotty, I thought they might interest you.

W.

Formula of peace-makings

…

5. And he of ye twain that shall go against the settlement or atonement made
or break the bidden troth,
He shall be wolf hunted, and to be hunted
As lean as men seek wolves;
Christian men seek churches;
Heathen men sacrifice in temples;
Fire burneth; earth groweth;
Son calleth mother, and mother heareth son;
Folk kindle fire;
Ship saileth; snow lieth;
the Fin skateth; the fir groweth;
The hawk flieth the long Spring day, 
With a fair wind behind him and wings outspread;
Heaven turneth; earth is dwelt on;
Wind bloweth; waters fall to the sea;
Churl soweth corn.”

“Whitman’s hopes, on the other hand, began to be realized only in the youth culture of the 1960s. Whitman would have been delighted by rock-and-roll, drugs, and the kind of casual, friendly copulation which is insouciant about the homosexual-heterosexual distinction. This historiography of the Sixties has come to be dominated by New Left politics, but we need to remember that lots of young people in the Sixties viewed Tom Hayden with the same suspicion as they viewed Lyndon Johnson. Their principal concern was cultural rather than political change. Dewey might have approved of the rock-and-roll culture in a guarded and deliberate way, but Whitman would have thrown himself into it wholeheartedly. “