And this was, O so long ago! How they come back to me--dimly and brokenly,
but with what a magic spell--those years of youth when I was soldiering!
Again I hear the far warble of blown bugles. Again I see the tall, blue
smoke of camp-fires ascending from the dim valleys of Wonderland. There
steals upon my sense the ghost of an odor from pines that canopy the
ambuscade. I feel upon my cheek the morning mist that shrouds the hostile
camp unaware of its doom, and my blood stirs at the ringing rifle-shot of
the solitary sentinel. Unfamiliar landscapes, glittering with sunshine or
sullen with rain, come to me demanding recognition, pass, vanish and give
place to others. Here in the night stretches a wide and blasted field
studded with half-extinct fires burning redly with I know not what presage
of evil. Again I shudder as I note its desolation and its awful silence.
Where was it? To what monstrous inharmony of death was it the visible
prelude?
O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar
constellations burned in the Southern midnights, and the mocking-bird
poured out his heart in the moon-gilded magnolia; when there was something
new under a new sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay
contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world,
accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life? Is it not strange
that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look
with so tender eyes?--that I recall with difficulty the danger and death
and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and
picturesque? Ah, Youth, there is no such wizard as thou! Give me but one
touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for
but one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly
surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at
Shiloh.