Every now and then, in hospital or camp, there are beings I
meet--specimens of unworldliness, disinterestedness, and animal purity
and heroism--perhaps some unconscious Indianian, or from Ohio or
Tennessee--on whose birth the calmness of heaven seems to have
descended, and whose gradual growing up, whatever the circumstances of
work-life or change, or hardship, or small or no education that attended
it, the power of a strange spiritual sweetness, fibre and inward health,
have also attended. Something veil'd and abstracted is often a part of
the manners of these beings. I have met them, I say, not seldom in the
army, in camp, and in the hospitals. The Western regiments contain many
of them. They are often young men, obeying the events and occasions
about them, marching, soldiering, righting, foraging, cooking, working
on farms or at some trade before the war--unaware of their own nature,
(as to that, who is aware of his own nature?) their companions only
understanding that they are different from the rest, more silent,
"something odd about them," and apt to go off and meditate and muse in
solitude.