Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face!

Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high–I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the unusual cos- tumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry boats the hundreds and hundreds that

cross, returning home, are more curious to me

than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years

hence are more to me, and more in my meditations,

than you might suppose.

This is the first of nine sections in "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry," in which Whitman keeps referring to the future, marveling that people a hundred years from his now, as he crosses the river between Manhattan and Brooklyn, would be looking at a version of what he is looking at and experiencing a version of what he is experiencing.

"A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them," he writes.