"Nothin'."

"What do you mean to do when you get back?"

"Nothin'."

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed, this

dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but one

degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--one

button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom.

A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the "subject race" by

any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his exposed surfaces. He

did not say much, possibly because he was convinced by the statements and

arguments of the Dutch captain. He had on strong, iron-heeled shoes, of

English make, which he said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the

prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, "For our homes."

Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great

indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a

sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory to

those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting for. A

feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such it could

be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence. It was

cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity from the

body politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the party.

"That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion. A young

fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly

smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine,

almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we turned

towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the loose

canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk. He was

from Mississippi, he said, had been at Georgetown College, and was so far

imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility before

him was not new to his ears. Of course I found it easy to come into

magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility what he was

fighting for. "Because I like the excitement of it," he answered. I

know those fighters with women's mouths and boys' cheeks. One such from

the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped away from his

nursery, and dashed in under, an assumed name among the red-legged

Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the

earliest conflicts of the war.

"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to the

young Mississippian.

"I have shot at a good many of them," he replied, modestly, his woman's

mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his

ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs

of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for

the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there

was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into

the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking how much

pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with

unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it

would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair

proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him

before he had time to say dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message.

Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us

hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but

of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened

in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his broad-brimmed,

steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,--a

sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified person like

him, business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted while occupied

with another, but giving himself up heartily to the claimant who held him

for the time. He was so genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it

seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all the morning, broke away

as we came into his presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled

the air all around us. He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were

his own private affair. In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic

message on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown, sent through the Government

channel from the State Capitol,--one so direct and urgent that I should

be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had sent in the

morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an

odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 't is almost an

apple," who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled faintly

at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion, and a

gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in the atmosphere of

horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with tents,

which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in huge letters,

thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S HOLE, and similar

inscriptions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which looks upon

the Susquehanna instead of the Common, and shows a long front of handsome

houses with fair gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile across here,

but very shallow now. The codling told us that a Rebel spy had been

caught trying its fords a little while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin

with a heavy ball chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a lie, Dr.

Wilson said. A little farther along we came to the barkless stump of the

tree to which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named after him, was

tied by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of scalping or

roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who paddled across the

stream to save him. Our youngling pointed out a very respectable-looking

stone house as having been "built by the Indians" about those times.

Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions and

dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.

"Who are those?" I said to my conductor.

"Them?" he answered. "Them's the men that's been out West, out to

Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin."

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever

it is called, seems most worth notice. Its facade is imposing, with a

row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a

crag over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower floor only appeared

to be open to the public. Its tessellated pavement and ample courts

suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel

uncrowded at their devotions; but from appearances about the place where

the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked the officiating priest

for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be

unanswered. The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once

looked upon,--the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua. It was the same

thing in Italy and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and

calls it a place of entertainment. The fragrance of innumerable

libations and the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall

ascend day and night through the arches of his funereal monument. What

are the poor dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that

stand at the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to

this perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching. The telegraph office would

presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown. Let

us step over and see for ourselves. A message! A message!

"Captain H. still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is

doing well Mrs HK--."

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the

hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or,

if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently

narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber

like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over-tense nerves

are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over

one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the

whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost

fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so

magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently

confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging

from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer

that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as I

could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with

protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers are

supposed to possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of his

ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means

the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had

nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest

consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday. The train from

Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A. M: We took another ride behind the

codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again. Being in a

gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the

town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as

seen by the different lights of evening and morning. After this, we

visited the school-house hospital. A fine young fellow, whose arm had

been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lock-jaw. The beads

of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and contracted features.

He was under the effect of opiates,--why not (if his case was desperate,

as it seemed to be considered) stop his sufferings with chloroform? It

was suggested that it might shorten life. "What then?" I said. "Are a

dozen additional spasms worth living for?"

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went

to the station. I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to

me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round.

Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed a

car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine,

without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so

silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near it

came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel

pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The train

was late,--fifteen minutes, half an hour late, and I began to get

nervous, lest something had happened. While I was looking for it, out

started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was

expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked an

employee of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few

minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train

with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and

answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did

occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven

persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and

crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected

train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the

track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;

there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many

cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us

Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural

impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so

that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once

overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his

brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women.

But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears,

while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film

of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or

griefs. I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice

addressed me by name. I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed

in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time. I should have

yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might

well call forth.

"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once

in Boston?"

"I do remember him well."

"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I am carrying his body back

with me on this train. He was my only child. If you could come to my

house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a pleasure to me."

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New

System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship and

capacity. It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and

I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth. Some time

afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to

President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course of

independent study he was proposing to himself. I was most happy to

smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and

express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at

Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a

trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never

saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his

mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer

would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words

spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's

chambers. For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of

contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to

me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must

now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil

sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed

the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has

died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation

and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded

soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come once

more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same region

I had left! No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart warm with

the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought of that

lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by Evangeline

upon the great river. Ah, me! if that railroad crash had been a few

hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so close

to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough. The

Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for

Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I took it for

granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some

ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity, and

pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their

invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion

was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some

of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares,

and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the

piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,--and all this after the

swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the

dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting

ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart! Thanks, uncounted

thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him from

Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite

bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well

under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging

everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time and

leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of

the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind

companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these

benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was no

longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were Kool Slaa and

Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet,

simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant of

Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in that

marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known

to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also

approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom we

passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so

good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it

as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of

that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the

country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by

its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our

economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences,

and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American

city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. Many of its characteristics

are accounted for to some extent by its geographical position. It is the

great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the

South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits,

and result in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric

brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out

Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its

famous water-works. In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was

with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial

fountain. Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and

diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I

looked upon their giant mechanism. But in the place of "Pratt's Garden"

was an open park, and the old house where Robert Morris held his court in

a former generation was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension

bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch

used to leap the river at a single bound,--an arch of greater span, as

they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry

Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of

Rhodes. It had an air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming

the dead level of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of

the rectangular city. Philadelphia will never be herself again until

another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new

palladium. She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly

shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple,

remembering the glories of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not

charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same Friday

evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated. As I

was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast

my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a

bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange

intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces. I

called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was

irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing

luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for

down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr.

Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad,

had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious look on his

face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and meant to do

it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch spread for

the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with no visits,

but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I saw on the

route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite

sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I

have ever seen,--each length being of a special pattern, ramified,

reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust

some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with

the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of

my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people

whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time or

other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a group

by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I

found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on

the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at New Haven.

The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various

ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in

the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then

before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show. Suppose that I

should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this everlasting

circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like

of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some

one of them was not a neighbor.

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's Bluff accident, the

Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our

homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the

ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate

this time, the house being really very full. Farther from the flowers and

nearer to the stars,--to reach the neighborhood of which last the per

ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any mortal,

wounded or well.

The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however. It is a giant

corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine judgment,

is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending

and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is

watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is

said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels

that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's. My

Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards.

I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested at

our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds the citizens had been

arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen. The Central Park is an

expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to form ridges which will

give views and hollows that will hold water. The hips and elbows and

other bones of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of rocks

which give character to the scenery, and an unchangeable, unpurchasable

look to a landscape that without them would have been in danger of being

fattened by art and money out of all its native features. The roads were

fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans

elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast

horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by

clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,--but it cost

me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of

Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends

on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as

Brookline is central to Boston.

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but remote

pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his

Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial

reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond. I say this not

invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our own

metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the

great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden,

the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth

Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer

clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her

right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be

ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for

home. Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling

houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford: then

NORWALK. Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of

the great disaster. But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my

readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my

friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them

hanging over the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of

two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its

phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown

again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes

cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that

look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for

balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a

detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so

murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the

frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its neat

carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, its

vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows; Hartford,

substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every conical spire an

extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so onward, by and across

the broad, shallow Connecticut,--dull red road and dark river woven in

like warp and woof by the shuttle of the darting engine; then

Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving, hot-summered,

giant-treed town,--city among villages, village among cities; Worcester,

with its Daedalian labyrinth of crossing railroad-bars, where the

snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled

in their dens; Framingham, fair cup-bearer, leaf-cinctured Hebe of the

deep-bosomed Queen sitting by the seaside on the throne of the Six

Nations. And now I begin to know the road, not by towns, but by single

dwellings; not by miles, but by rods. The poles of the great magnet that

draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains

must be near at hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and

screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall granite obelisk

comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp

against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge

flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of

the three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as

when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half-open chlamys

before her worshippers.

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters

and towards the western sun! Let the joyous light shine in upon the

pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the

names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our

boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side of

honor and of duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his

aches and weariness. So comes down another night over this household,

unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings,--a night of peaceful rest and

grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive

again, and was lost and is found.

THE INEVITABLE TRIAL

[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the 4th

of July, 1863.]

It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's birth,

to recall whatever is happiest and noblest in our past history, and to

join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the heroes, the men of

thought and the men of action, to whom that history owes its existence.

In other years this pleasing office may have been all that was required

of the holiday speaker. But to-day, when the very life of the nation is

threatened, when clouds are thick about us, and men's hearts are

throbbing with passion, or failing with fear, it is the living question

of the hour, and not the dead story of the past, which forces itself into

all minds, and will find unrebuked debate in all assemblies.

In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who sincerely

love their country and mean to do their duty to her disappoint the hopes

and expectations of those who are actively working in her cause. They

seem to have lost whatever moral force they may have once possessed, and

to go drifting about from one profitless discontent to another, at a time

when every citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service. It is

because their minds are bewildered, and they are no longer truly

themselves. Show them the path of duty, inspire them with hope for the

future, lead them upwards from the turbid stream of events to the bright,

translucent springs of eternal principles, strengthen their trust in

humanity and their faith in God, and you may yet restore them to their

manhood and their country.

At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious

recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should try to judge the weak and

wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously. The conditions in

which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find themselves are new

and unprovided for. Our quiet burghers and farmers are in the position

of river-boats blown from their moorings out upon a vast ocean, where

such a typhoon is raging as no mariner who sails its waters ever before

looked upon. If their beliefs change with the veering of the blast, if

their trust in their fellow-men, and in the course of Divine Providence,

seems well-nigh shipwrecked, we must remember that they were taken

unawares, and without the preparation which could fit them to struggle

with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith is the

man; and they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to

those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech, feeble

in effort, and purposeless in aim.

Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,--that

self-government is the natural condition of an adult society, as

distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary

arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences;

that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every

child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the

best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two

claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves and

divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union; that the

contest in which we are engaged is one of principles overlaid by

circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we study the

movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral nature

of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the study; that all

honest persons with average natural sensibility, with respectable

understanding, educated in the school of northern teaching, will have

eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed host which fights

or pleads for freedom, as against every form of tyranny; if not in the

front rank now, then in the rear rank by and by;--assuming these

propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are ready to do, and believing

that the more they are debated before the public the more they will gain

converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting to keep the great

questions of the time in unceasing and untiring agitation. They must be

discussed, in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by different

classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen; by statesmen and simple

voters; by moralists and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated

hand-laborers; by men of facts and figures, and by men of theories and

aspirations; in the abstract and in the concrete; discussed and

rediscussed every month, every week, every day, and almost every hour, as

the telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky

base of our political order.

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions of

the great body of loyal citizens. They may do nothing toward changing

the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who

follow politics as a trade. They may have no hold upon that class of

persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as other persons are

wanting in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds, the

tender consciences supported by the tremulous knees of an infirm

intelligence, the timid compromisers who are always trying to curve the

straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual

debate of these living questions is the one offered means of grace and

hope of earthly redemption. And thus a true, unhesitating patriot may be

willing to listen with patience to arguments which he does not need, to

appeals which have no special significance for him, in the hope that some

less clear in mind or less courageous in temper may profit by them.

As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth day

of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of American

Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge in

public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental

one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any

ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are

madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe

and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are

in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to an irresponsible

tyranny; if we are moving in the narrow circles which are to ingulf us in

national ruin,--then we had better sing a dirge, and leave this idle

assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are reverberating through the

air, and tear down the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery

symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there

should be silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets;

and the emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its

future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result

of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away

the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy

end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for the

kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to such

dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right

throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but a

peace proclaimed from the capital of every revolted province in the name

of the sacred, inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm,

conjured up by the imagination of the weak, acted on by the craft of the

cunning; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our perdition, the

movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution carries us

farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's

blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of

the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make

them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's

discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant

festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our

harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to inherit the

fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making day

and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come a

little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come. The disease of

the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery of

war was its only remedy.

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse

into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if

this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have

gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the glories

of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his heresies; if

Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr. Phillips, the

Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never

uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr. Clay had

still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention;

if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to

fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,--we might have

been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but simple

Martha's faith, without the reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst

been here, my brother had not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling, who

believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride their

waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to

continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own

bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human

progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the

intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in the

more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more familiar than that there

is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once, so

that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star. You

may trace a common motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the

earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek architecture, and

in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth

and following centuries, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and

blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the

flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven. You may see the

same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the

names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in

the painters, the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the

authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this

century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of

Cowper and the song of Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that

Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same

reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived

independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity

with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their

hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness

beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that

Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce,

were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. You

see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were

startling the crown officials with the same accents of liberty, and why

the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the

Province of Massachusetts. This law of simultaneous intellectual

movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay

and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable

to that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the

present conflict.

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this

or that enthusiast or fanatic. It was the consequence of a movement in

mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions, and

the men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it most

completely, or who talked longest and loudest about it. Long before the

accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the halls

of the Capitol, long before the "Liberator" opened its batteries, the

controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and

predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional

divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the

seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon

the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a

quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would

be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight

which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union

was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but through

the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two

sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half a

century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the

system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the

sight of his descendants, that "by an inevitable chain of causes and

effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." The

Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he

saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of

Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year

when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned

us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the

cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The

descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny," the "petty tyrants"

as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to

love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they

tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet

where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous

emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become changed

by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness.

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden

harvest of crime. Violence stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and

perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly organized

conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief

stronghold of the Union. That the principle which underlay these acts of

fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed

sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government

to be its Messiah to the listening world. As with Pharaoh, the Lord

hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened that

of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. Then spake Mr.

"Vice-President" Stephens those memorable words which fixed forever the

theory of the new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism to

the dignity of a philosophic system. He first proclaimed the gospel of

eternal tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved for

the western Palestine. Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! The

corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized inequality of

races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men protect women and

children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and of

God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward of

his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary

curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon

whose darkness has dawned the star of the occidental Bethlehem!

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave States,

we read in the "Richmond Examiner": "The establishment of the

Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course of the

mistaken civilization of the age. For 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,'

we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination, and Government."

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to look

for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency in

dividing the country. Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you

will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half across

the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its splintery

projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to

the limitations of particular States, but as a county or other limited

section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. Add to this the

official statement made in 1862, that "there is not one regiment or

battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in or derived from

the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union"; throw in

gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit declaration in the speech referred

to, and we will consider the evidence closed for the present on this

count of the indictment.

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of

fracture, this precise statement, testimony from so many sources,

extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of

slavery, a priori, and its actual influence as shown by the facts, few

will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed its

course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on the

white subjects of its corrupting dominion. Northern acquiescence or even

sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily on the

consciences of its supporters. Many profess to think that Northern

fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing the black dye

of slavery in regions which would but for that have washed themselves

free of its stain in tears of penitence. It is a delusion and a snare to

trust in any such false and flimsy reasons where there is enough and more

than enough in the institution itself to account for its growth. Slavery

gratifies at once the love of power, the love of money, and the love of

ease; it finds a victim for anger who cannot smite back his oppressor;

and it offers to all, without measure, the seductive privileges which the

Mormon gospel reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible of

Mahomet only dares promise to the saints in heaven.

Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that the

same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and the

leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not

satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross also for

the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its conservative

traditions! It is asserted that the fault was quite as much on our side

as on the other; that our agitators and abolishers kindled the flame for

which the combustibles were all ready on the other side of the border.

If these men could have been silenced, our brothers had not died.

Who are the persons that use this argument? They are the very ones who

are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right of free

discussion. At a time when every power the nation can summon is needed

to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their force upon its

foes,--when a false traitor at home may lose us a battle by a word, and a

lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or weekly

stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the liberty of

speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to deal with government,

with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any terms they

choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and assail the

only men who have any claim at all to rule over the country, as the very

ones who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposition members of

society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault with those

persons who spoke their minds freely in the past on that great question

which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards

reformers. They are never general favorites. They are apt to interfere

with vested rights and time-hallowed interests. They often wear an

unlovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to that of

Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances. It

is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty.

It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark

plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of

eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious

analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the

general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral

nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they

please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them or

not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.

They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but

they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as

soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die. To quarrel with

them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far

from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden

upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of

court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the

bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule

of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which

will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one

of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him

at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of

Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the

Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of Slavery! They hunted

another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within

a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the

marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, marched out before a

vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the

streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and

Liberty!

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at

their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously

emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is

charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly

understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with them,

as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed

characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act from

sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon

them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any

two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.

It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in the

keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left the hard

intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant presence of

beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman is the

ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or

later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion; which will

by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last

thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters. Woman herself

borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and

childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the

picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our

home." To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively

attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the

sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is

merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural

sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one

direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the

other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally

inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics. For what is

meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his convictions of

what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his

fractional share of the government extends. If one has come to the

conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or

statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected

that he will choose to be represented by those who share his belief, and

who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get rid of

the wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents involved.

To prevent opinion from organizing itself under political forms may be

very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice of

self-government. And if at last organized opinions become arrayed in

hostile shape against each other, we shall find that a just war is only

the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected impulses of

which the original source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and

uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing

through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of

material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the

statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender

conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks upon

the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out

of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because

of thine enemies."

The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the order of

Nature and the Being who established it. Unless the law of moral

progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it

would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience

against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the words of so

calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents

"such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have

been totally perverted." Until the infinite selfishness of the powers

that hate and fear the principles of free government swallowed up their

convenient virtues, that system was hissed at by all the old-world

civilization. While in one section of our land the attempt has been

going on to lift it out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the

sphere of the world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the

protest of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow louder and stronger

until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces. The

moral uprising of the North came with the logical precision of destiny;

the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to erect a slave

empire followed with fated certainty; and the only question left for us

of the North was, whether we should suffer the cause of the Nation to go

by default, or maintain its existence by the argument of cannon and

musket, of bayonet and sabre.

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy

purpose. It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the preservation

of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a

civil request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation

would commit suicide, without making any unnecessary trouble about it.

It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that there

were constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying violent

hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone,

that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from food until the

natural consequences of that proceeding should manifest themselves. All

this was done as between a single State and an isolated fortress; but it

was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast

conspiracy uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of

treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the doors were

opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle their wild

natures to frenzy, was the sight of flowing blood.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated

beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice

aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into

the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was

literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the

southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the

trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom

history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient

Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote

every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to

torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that

she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the

smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the

representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the

North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid

hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's

Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved

the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope for in

the future,--the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next

to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to

all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of

events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name

humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please

themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under

any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence of

South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat,

in which we must either die or give the last and finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida

would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia

the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored

under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of

the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have

perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis

shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of

secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the

red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the ships

and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the

traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States

have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now

triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,

Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by

fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the

Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation

as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of the

volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the

first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that in

the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not

sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe to

strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its golden

scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.

Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can

forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be

found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own

streets, against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were

to defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had

suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish

the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on

the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud

labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of

freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands

of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and

to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are our

enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating.

We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us. We know

what the West End of London wishes may be result of this controversy.

The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears,

threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut

into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult if they

could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless

weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of

knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great

Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in

struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to

abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then

become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect

way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict

made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the

Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than

those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same

position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.

"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our

national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied that

the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places,

is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds,

"everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of

free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an

oligarchy." These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose

generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by

the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever

spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which

infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of

British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms of

the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt,

very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a strife

which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one side

the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in earnest, and

on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her own poet, one of

the truest and purest of her children, had said of his countrymen, in

words which might well have been spoken by the British Premier to the

American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind feeling on the part

of his government:

"Alas I expect it not. We found no bait

To tempt us in thy country. Doing good,

Disinterested good, is not our trade."

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest lines.

We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why they are

our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, which, in

spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs so long

associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne. One of

these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the purchased army;

the third is the long-suffering people. Whenever the third caryatid

comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe

will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder that our

ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic

split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and

standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be

pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that

broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know

our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social

progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both

been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has

been true to the cause of the people. That deep and generous thinker,

who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher

thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which

none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to

listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from

liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations

embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.

Italy,--would you know on which side the rights of the people and the

hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what

surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager

sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling

many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the

heroic Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is

granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the nation,

and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind,

for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against

oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the

unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be

that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it too

much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North depends

chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and

manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold

out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can never be told until they

are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of

these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns of either. We have

a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to

give up a just and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown

to be unattainable for want of material agencies. What was the end to be

attained by accepting the gage of battle? It was to get the better of

our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps which we

should then consider necessary to our present and future safety. The

more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must it be subdued.

It may not even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long since,

that the victory over the rebellion should have been easily and speedily

won, and so have failed to develop the true meaning of the conflict, to

bring out the full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the

means which would have served it for a still more desperate future

effort. We cannot complain that our task has proved too easy. We give

our Southern army,--for we must remember that it is our army, after all,

only in a state of mutiny,--we give our Southern army credit for

excellent spirit and perseverance in the face of many disadvantages. But

we have a few plain facts which show the probable course of events; the

gradual but sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of

the boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even

of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting with

their long lines of bayonets,--may God grant them victory!--the progress

of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold and currency

at Richmond and Washington. If the index-hands of force and credit

continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where will the

Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of

the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources of our

opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own.

The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but runs as freely

as ever when its last grains are about to fall. The merchant wears as

bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at the

height of his fortunes. If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy "a

mere shell," so far as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we

say how soon the shell will collapse? It seems impossible that our own

dissensions can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the

Morristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his

faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is

ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure

on every inch of the containing surface. Now we know the tremendous

force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern people. There

are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence

which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds, and

drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what is

the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the

remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of

destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of the

fabric of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason

from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of the

people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible that

the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious

recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans,

their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and

protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the

same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical

organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and

eternal alienation. Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite

sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other

prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the

plotters have managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to be

doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in

Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of

deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the enemies,"

as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the

prison-cells of Paul and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the

aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is

material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it, to

overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from

impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its

new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan

which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue with

blood-vessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say

absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of those

whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of discouragement. Can

we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands? As honor

comes before safety, let us look at that first. We have undertaken to

resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and

aggressions, even to the direct menace of our national capital. The

blood which our best and bravest have shed will never sink into the

ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is shown

to be insufficient. If we stop now, all the loss of life has been

butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the

outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of

honor blooms forever where it was shed. To accept less than indemnity

for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can

afford it, and security for the future, would discredit us in our own

eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to despise us.

But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the

surrender of our fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on

the banks of the national river,--and this and much more would surely be

demanded of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a level

with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open

to be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would

be safe and lasting? We could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough

for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to knit

together. But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace, in

which the grass would have time to grow in the war-paths, and the bruised

arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State arsenal,

sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many sucking lambs?

It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers would be again

summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we have seen

enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us

contented with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is whether

we could leave our children and our children's children with any secure

trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are

enduring, probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated

form.

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is

established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace

possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who

already call the Southern whites their masters. We know what the

prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those people

have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and

bitter warfare. We know what their tone is to the people of the North;

if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are schoolmasters who will

teach us to our heart's content. We see how easily their social

organization adapts itself to a state of warfare. They breed a superior

order of men for leaders, an ignorant commonalty ready to follow them as

the vassals of feudal times followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen,

who, unless this war changes them from chattels to human beings, will

continue to add vastly to their military strength in raising their food,

in building their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in

fact, except, it may be, the handling of weapons. The institution

proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not

merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human

instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of the

desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah. They call

themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North, yet there is

as much difference between their Christianity and that of Wesley or of

Channing, as between creeds that in past times have vowed mutual

extermination. Still we must not call them barbarians because they

cherish an institution hostile to civilization. Their highest culture

stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark background of ignorance

against which it is seen; but it would be injustice to deny that they

have always shone in political science, or that their military capacity

makes them most formidable antagonists, and that, however inferior they

may be to their Northern fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature

and science, the social elegances and personal graces lend their outward

show to the best circles among their dominant class.

Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,--our

neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands of

miles,--but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce, intolerant,

fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual standing army;

hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his swarthy boy to hate

the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile nation on our frontier

is incompatible with our peaceful development? Their wealth, the proceeds

of enforced labor, multiplied by the breaking up of new cottonfields, and

in due time by the reopening of the slave-trade, will go to purchase

arms, to construct fortresses, to fit out navies. The old Saracens,

fanatics for a religion which professed to grow by conquest, were a

nation of predatory and migrating warriors. The Southern people,

fanatics for a system essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which

cannot remain stationary, but must grow by alternate appropriations of

labor and of land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes.

Already, even, the insolence of their language to the people of the North

is a close imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics

affected toward all the nations of Europe. What the "Christian dogs"

were to the followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the "Northern

mud-sills" are to the followers of the Southern Moloch. The

accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were prefigured in

the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train of Painim knights

who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent. In all branches of

culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond them. The schools of

mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian teachers. The heavens

declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers, as Algorab and Aldebaran

repeat their Arabic names to the students of the starry firmament. The

sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of the nineteenth century, to hold

the treasures of its Industry, could show nothing fairer than the court

which copies the Moorish palace that crowns the summit of Granada. Yet

this was the power which Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity

and civilization, had to break like a potter's vessel; these were the

people whom Spain had to utterly extirpate from the land where they had

ruled for centuries.

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous Afrit of

Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will be to you

what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shattered their

armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their broken strength upon

the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms. Prepare for the possible fate

of Christian Spain; for a slave-market in Philadelphia; for the Alhambra

of a Southern caliph on the grounds consecrated by the domestic virtues

of a long line of Presidents and their exemplary families. Remember the

ages of border warfare between England and Scotland, closed at last by

the union of the two kingdoms. Recollect the hunting of the deer on the

Cheviot hills, and all that it led to; then think of the game which the

dogs will follow open-mouthed across our Southern border, and all that is

like to follow which the child may rue that is unborn; think of these

possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are

ready to make a peace which will give you such a neighbor; which may

betray your civilization as that of half the Peninsula was given up to

the Moors; which may leave your fair border provinces to be crushed under

the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left to be trodden down by the Duke

of Alva!

No! no! fellow-citizens! We must fight in this quarrel until one side or

the other is exhausted. Rather than suffer all that we have poured out

of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance, to have been

expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question, an unfinished

conflict, an unavenged insult, an unrighted wrong, a stained escutcheon,

a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an unheroic memory to the

descendants of those who have always claimed that their fathers were

heroes; rather than do all this, it were hardly an American exaggeration

to say, better that the last man and the last dollar should be followed

by the last woman and the last dime, the last child and the last copper!

There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a

mere irresponsible tyranny. If there are any who really believe that our

present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and family,

that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become ABRAHAM,

DEI GRATIA REX,--they cannot have duly pondered his letter of June 12th,

in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a rustic lover called

upon by an anxious parent to explain his intentions. The force of his

argument is not at all injured by the homeliness of his illustrations.

The American people are not much afraid that their liberties will be

usurped. An army of legislators is not very likely to throw away its

political privileges, and the idea of a despotism resting on an open

ballot-box, is like that of Bunker Hill Monument built on the waves of

Boston Harbor. We know pretty well how much of sincerity there is in the

fears so clamorously expressed, and how far they are found in company

with uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the nation. We

have learned to put a true value on the services of the watch-dog who

bays the moon, but does not bite the thief!

The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands are

wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it that

would be very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal man,

however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such as

emergencies always give rise to. If any half-loyal man forgets his code

of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become obnoxious to the

peremptory justice which takes the place of slower forms in all centres

of conflagration, there is no sympathy for him among the soldiers who are

risking their lives for us; perhaps there is even more satisfaction than

when an avowed traitor is caught and punished. For of all men who are

loathed by generous natures, such as fill the ranks of the armies of the

Union, none are so thoroughly loathed as the men who contrive to keep

just within the limits of the law, while their whole conduct provokes

others to break it; whose patriotism consists in stopping an inch short

of treason, and whose political morality has for its safeguard a just

respect for the jailer and the hangman! The simple preventive against

all possible injustice a citizen is like to suffer at the hands of a

government which in its need and haste must of course commit many errors,

is to take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly help the

enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war. When the clamor

against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can claim this

negative merit, it may be listened to. When it comes from those who have

done what they could to serve their country, it will receive the

attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which

demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for changing the essential

principle of our self-governing system is a figment which its contrivers

laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of

Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality of an executive act

meant in good faith for their protection against the invader? We are all

citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of

their peril, and with the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to

understand the difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that

helps and the man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in

sight, complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who

violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they

jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, and

bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged twenty

buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the

whirlpool of national destruction. If our borders are invaded, it is

only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his

slumbering mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that

liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for. We are pouring out

the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always

the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we

to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets

are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry is

abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of

employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an

inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of

heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the

inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages,

whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of

golden sand,--what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and

bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and

over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with

Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under

the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.? Was she content to

negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in

depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our national

stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the "five-twenty"

war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount of nearly two

hundred millions, without any check to the flow of the current pressing

inwards against the doors of the Treasury? Except in those portions of

the country which are the immediate seat of war, or liable to be made so,

and which, having the greatest interest not to become the border states

of hostile nations, can best afford to suffer now, the state of

prosperity and comfort is such as to astonish those who visit us from

other countries. What are war taxes to a nation which, as we are assured

on good authority, has more men worth a million now than it had worth ten

thousand dollars at the close of the Revolution,--whose whole property is

a hundred times, and whose commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred

times, what it was then? But we need not study Mr. Still's pamphlet and

"Thompson's Bank-Note Reporter" to show us what we know well enough,

that, so far from having occasion to tremble in fear of our impending

ruin, we must rather blush for our material prosperity. For the

multitudes who are unfortunate enough to be taxed for a million or more,

of course we must feel deeply, at the same time suggesting that the more

largely they report their incomes to the tax-gatherer, the more

consolation they will find in the feeling that they have served their

country. But,--let us say it plainly,--it will not hurt our people to be

taught that there are other things to be cared for besides money-making

and money-spending; that the time has come when manhood must assert

itself by brave deeds and noble thoughts; when womanhood must assume its

most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort," and, if need be, "to command,"

those whose services their country calls for. This Northern section of

the land has become a great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities

are the long-extended counter. We have grown rich for what? To put gilt

bands on coachmen's hats? To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest

silks which the toiling artisans of France can send us? To look through

plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the black

ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its

old minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in

diamonds? to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust? to float through

life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the

beaches, and back again from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for this

that the broad domain of the Western hemisphere was kept so long

unvisited by civilization?--for this, that Time, the father of empires,

unbound the virgin zone of this youngest of his daughters, and gave her,

beautiful in the long veil of her forests, to the rude embrace of the

adventurous Colonist? All this is what we see around us, now, now while

we are actually fighting this great battle, and supporting this great

load of indebtedness. Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of

Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement, For

Sale or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed, as she sings,

"Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"

till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy

bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform

of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay

them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a

dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the

street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and

it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves,

the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy;

then let us talk of the Maelstrom;--but till then, let us not be cowards

with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth

for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed

current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every

hour, out of the influence of the great failing which was born of our

wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal inheritance!

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we are

just leaving.

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our Lord

eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock in the

morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South Carolina

at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States. Its ball

carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled

in the mould of malignant deliberation. Its wad was the charter of our

national existence. Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which bore the

symbol of our national sovereignty. As the echoes of its thunder died

away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office of the land.

That word was WAR!

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is

claimed by its true parents. This war has eaten its way backward through

all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of

ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts

in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands

revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two

incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must

dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the

hemisphere for its development.

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms

which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as above

all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum

acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: "Necessity itself which

reduces things to the mere right of Nature." The old rules which were

enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless "as

moonlight on the dial of the day." We have followed precedents as long

as they could guide us; now we must make precedents for the ages which

are to succeed us.

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the

current prices of United States stocks show that we value our nationality

at only a small fraction of our wealth. If we feel that we are paying

too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall those grand

words of Samuel Adams:

"I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it were

revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to perish,

and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty!"

What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he

said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will be

done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,--because my will is Thine.

We want the virile energy of determination which made the oath of Andrew

Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint that the recording

angel might have entered it unquestioned among the prayers of the

faithful.

War is a grim business. Two years ago our women's fingers were busy

making "Havelocks." It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half

the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and

illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead

ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and noble

principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought we were

fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and what we

are fighting against.

We are fighting for our existence. We say to those who would take back

their several contributions to that undivided unity which we call the

Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot

reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible! There are rights,

possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties, acquired, retained,

called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute

solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic whole, which

cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim as its

own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of

rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or confess

self-government itself a failure.

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence

reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on which it was

written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the

necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the

venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause

of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms. Whether we know it or not,

whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system

that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the

Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate. And this ought to

make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of

old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim was

to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The

sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burial-place

more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his

brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in

his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the

rights which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we

must fight it against that great General who will bring to it all the

powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down

from heaven. He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him;

he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has

engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the

profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler natures by

motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we pity as we ought

always to pity the error of those who know not what they do. Against him

or for him we are all called upon to declare ourselves. There is no

neutrality for any single true-born American. If any seek such a

position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse points them to their

place in the antechamber of the Halls of Despair,--

"--With that ill band

Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,

Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves

Were only."

"--Fame of them the world hath none

Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both.

Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."

We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve him

against the enemies of civilization. We must make and keep the great

river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the forefoot of the

wild, untamable rebellion. We must not be too nice in the choice of our

agents. Non eget Mauri jaculis,--no African bayonets wanted,--was well

enough while we did not yet know the might of that desperate giant we had

to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,--white or black,--is the safer motto

now; for a good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.

The iron-skins, as well as the iron-clads, have already done us noble

service, and many a mother will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will

welcome back the war-worn husband, whose smile would never again have

gladdened his home, but that, cold in the shallow trench of the

battle-field, lies the half-buried form of the unchained bondsman whose

dusky bosom sheathes the bullet which would else have claimed that

darling as his country's sacrifice.

We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise. It may be

long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we

may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed

and led to victory. We must be patient, as our fathers were patient;

even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be

a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it

costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty,

this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if

we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a

nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who

vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her

assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of

the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you

have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood

for your temporal salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely

through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are

starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark

them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of

the soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the

victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as

children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under

nameless mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them.

By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by

the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children

yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated

sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men

everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the

advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to stand

by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and in

defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization,

Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's

emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the wall of Fort

Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient inheritance,

every fortress, every capital, every ship, and this warring land is once

more a, United Nation!

CINDERS FROM THE ASHES.

The personal revelations contained in my report of certain

breakfast-table conversations were so charitably listened to and so

good-naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming

over-communicative. Still, I should never have ventured to tell the

trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my brief

story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining

figure that trod the same path with me for a time, or crossed it,

leaving a momentary or lasting brightness in its track. I remember

that, in furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its

dull aspect as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead

and bureau. "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to

the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher. It

was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment

as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving

reader,--and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed,

--I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with

which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is

merely personal in my recollections.

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine

loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great

forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by

the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken

in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish faculties or

check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample

chair,--a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present

Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William Biglow. This

generation is not familiar with his title to renown, although he fills

three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American

Literature." He was a humorist hardly robust enough for more than a

brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for

I do not remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our

benches.

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the

"Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the

College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much

of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared

with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful

mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and

Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the

"Opposition House" and the "Clark House," these roads were almost all the

way bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" of Main Street, or

were abreast of that forlorn "First Row" of Harvard Street. We called

the boys of that locality "Port-chucks." They called us

"Cambridge-chucks," but we got along very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular

loveliness. I once before referred to her as "the golden blonde," but did

not trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her appearance in

the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys as the appearance

of Miranda was to Caliban. Her abounding natural curls were so full of

sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile and her voice were

so all-subduing, that half our heads were turned. Her fascinations were

everywhere confessed a few years afterwards; and when I last met her,

though she said she was a grandmother, I questioned her statement, for

her winning looks and ways would still have made her admired in any

company.

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very

small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet,

reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning

to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer years. One of

these two boys was destined to be widely known, first in literature, as

author of one of the most popular books of its time and which is

freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer; a man who, if his

countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the national councils.

Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears; he found it

famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of

unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary

and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.

She came with the reputation of being "smart," as we should have called

it, clever as we say nowadays. This was Margaret Fuller, the only one

among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke," like "Bettina," has

slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored,

and floats on the waves of speech as "Margaret." Her air to her

schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she

had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a great

student and a great reader of what she used to call "naw-vels." I

remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret

that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of

her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living.

Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair

complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which

she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A

remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and

undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would

compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the

ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,

magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing

the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened

and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a

fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative,

showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the

viraginian aspect.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a

celebrity as Margaret. I remember being greatly awed once, in our

school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes

were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among

them one of hers. I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I

fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one,

at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first

words.

"It is a trite remark," she began.

I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever

judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?

I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about

the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders

with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was

to enter college. It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher

training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer

advantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us. We had

been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries. Some Boston boys

of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very

lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel

Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise.

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of

quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was not.

Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true;

but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the exceptional

kind. I had tendencies in the direction of flageolets and octave flutes.

I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty

nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and

smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol,

by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for

no maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread

implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and

preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning of

the autumn.

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized

from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly

along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the seat of

learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now

North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and

swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical

ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the

ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square

boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through

the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then

darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its

lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village

centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the

rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into the

hallowed borders of the academic town.

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just at

the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very worthy

professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable, exemplary, but

thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of

homoousianism, or some such doctrine. There was a great rock that showed

its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but it

hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling to get

uppermost in my youthful bosom; for I was not too old for

home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave

me at last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then

climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the window in the back

of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to

some widowed heart.

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but

time. Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy. There was an

ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf,

rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous

fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the

poor-relation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not with

apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her benevolence,

and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same in water, and

encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific for

seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a mockery,

and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.

I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on

the water often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began

to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions

surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the

most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life. My

room-mate came later. He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring

town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons at

Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I

suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was

slightly indisposed, he administered to me,--with the best intentions, no

doubt,--a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time,

as Mr. Morrissey would say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it

that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had

come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a

word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so

brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look any

whiter when I was laid out as a corpse." After my room-mate and I had

been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen and

acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close literary

neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him,

in the last number of the "Galaxy." Does it not sometimes seem as if we

were all marching round and round in a circle, like the supernumeraries

who constitute the "army" of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is

met by the same and only the same people, or their doubles, twice,

thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts

off its borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and

uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge, since the

piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the

ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to "Harvard

Hall." Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--the principal and

his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the

late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who

looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a

clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant

of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised

myself to be amiable.

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these words:

YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the

budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with

its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a

fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly

malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous

violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His

delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at

all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.

Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and

profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very

distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his

choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late

homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up presently, and

cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so? If

the son of that boy's father could not be trusted, what boy in

Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be

slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him

out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for

safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of

one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle in my

bosom! I parted from him, however, none the worse for his companionship

so far as I can remember.

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great

distinction among the scholars of the land. One day I observed a new boy

in a seat not very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as I

recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at length

I got a chance to look at them. Of all the new-comers during my whole

year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, but

there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the morning

of his entrance. His head was between his hands (I wonder if he does not

sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes were

fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him heir

to a million. I feel sure that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not

find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive portrait.

Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less familiarly

have faded from my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful

student, sitting there entranced over the page of his text-book,--the

child-father of the distinguished scholar that was to be,--is not a

picture framed and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its

walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.

My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of

speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble

manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas

Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the State

of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any honest and

intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question. This

was one of two or three friendships that lasted. There were other friends

and classmates, one of them a natural humorist of the liveliest sort, who

would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was so

potently contagious.

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was Professor

Moses Stuart. His house was nearly opposite the one in which I resided

and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the Seminary. I

have seen few more striking figures in my life than his, as I remember

it. Tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly,

accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and

impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic

orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like Cicero's, and his

toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever

might have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid grace that he

might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the

side of the antiques of the Vatican.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his

throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking

of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health gives

a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed course

which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest and the

fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the transient

ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before the

procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the

Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to

be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy,

as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as old

doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their later

days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long and so

exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the mediaeval

schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world is

waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these

wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of

an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part heard

of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which was the

more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we debated.

Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away early, and

padding the other with prosperity so that his course was comparatively

noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one in particular,

"The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong

obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan, which the

community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger of

the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a

season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking

students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for

them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual

exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of

football were followed with some spirit.

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in very

shallow and simple sources. Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the sober

tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact with a

world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting

impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen

hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village

paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis

descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum.

I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much

wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed

with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious,

perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies.

The little Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack,

the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning

stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities,

for he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living

protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality. It did not

take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this is apt

to be so with young people. What else could have made us think it great

sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter and "camp out,"--on

the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed tent-wise, except the fact

that to a boy a new discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a

luxury.

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the

preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying. He had

a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and

told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him in

turn, as one whom they were soon to lose. More than one boy kept his eye

on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man

had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say

the hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with my

room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the Merrimack

which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old meetinghouse,

where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient parsonage, with the

bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by

the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when I

awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped

the towers and spires of a great city!--for such was my fancy, and

whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate to

inquire too nicely.

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have survived

so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil, out of which I

remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of

beginners:

"Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm

The boiling ocean trembled into calm."

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary, Queen

of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and

sentimentally. My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted.

Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large

hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof, suspended by iron

rods. Subject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive, illustrating

the magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life into

forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,--the gift of Heaven

to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon to

the monarch on his throne; from the burning sands of the desert to the

frozen icebergs of the poles, from--but I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. I went from the Academy

to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again for a long

time.

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for many

years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more found

myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill. My first

pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing by

the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held, buried

in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the

Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks. I then began the once

familiar toil of ascending the long declivity. Academic villages seem to

change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns down with

all its books. A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new library

begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor, for

the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story

of them must be told succinctly. It is like the opium-smoker's showing

you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the

precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the

new library building on my left. But for these it was surprising to see

how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. The

Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach

landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old. The pale brick

seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and

"Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--carried there in the

night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my left

again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and

in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I

lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he knew

so well. I went to the front of the house. There was the great rock

showing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on that,

whispered the small ghost. I looked in at the upper window in the

farther part of the house. I looked out of that on four long changing

seasons, said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, but,

while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or what used to be

the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted from my investigation

and went on my way. The apparition that put me and my little ghost to

flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a gun in its hand. I think

it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun, which drove me off.

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after

passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and here

is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy building.

Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a

gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the crash of

tumbling pins from those precincts? The little ghost said, Never! It

cannot be. But it was. "Have they a billiard-room in the upper story?"

I asked myself. "Do the theological professors take a hand at all-fours

or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular columns of the

'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoralized for the moment, it is

plain; but now that I have recovered from the shock, I must say that the

fact mentioned seems to show a great advance in common sense from the

notions prevailing in my time.

I sauntered,--we, rather, my ghost and I,--until we came to a broken

field where there was quarrying and digging going on,--our old base-ball

ground, hard by the burial-place. There I paused; and if any thoughtful

boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has sown with

memories of the time when he was young shall follow my footsteps, I need

not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be enchained by the noble

view before him. Far to the north and west the mountains of New

Hampshire lifted their summits in along encircling ridge of pale blue

waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline

with perfect definition against the sky. This was a sight which had more

virtue and refreshment in it than any aspect of nature that I had looked

upon, I am afraid I must say for years. I have been by the seaside now

and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running

here and there, listening to what the winds have to say and getting angry

with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief

to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging

mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls!--and

the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments

of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her

bravest and hardiest children,--I can never look at them without feeling

that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward

heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a

vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. It is more than a year since I

have looked on those blue mountains, and they "are to me as a feeling"

now, and have been ever since.