Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent surgical director of the

hospitals of the place, took me in charge. He carried me to the house of

a worthy and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed Church, where I

was to take tea and pass the night. What became of the Moravian chaplain

I did not know; but my friend the Philanthropist had evidently made up

his mind to adhere to my fortunes. He followed me, therefore, to the

house of the "Dominic," as a newspaper-correspondent calls my kind host,

and partook of the fare there furnished me. He withdrew with me to the

apartment assigned for my slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow

where I waked and tossed. Nay, I do affirm that he did, unconsciously,

I believe, encroach on that moiety of the couch which I had flattered

myself was to be my own through the watches of the night, and that I

was in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be gradually, but

irresistibly, expelled from the bed which I had supposed destined for

my sole possession. As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the

Philanthropist clave unto me. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where

thou lodgest, I will lodge." A really kind, good man, full of zeal,

determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought, he doubted

nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a purely

benevolent errand. When he reads this, as I hope he will, let him be

assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any accommodation

from being in my company, let me tell him that I learned a lesson from

his active benevolence. I could, however, have wished to hear him laugh

once before we parted, perhaps forever. He did not, to the best of

my recollection, even smile during the whole period that we were in

company. I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor

are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in

people of sentiment who are always ready with their tears and abounding

in passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a

practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with

its peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its

agencies, an organizing and arranging faculty, a steady set of nerves,

and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of

cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave,

occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social

force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through

its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it

whistles and sings at its work. When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled

with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospitals, he

found his temper and manners very different from what would have been

expected. My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary

exploration of the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with

him, as above mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them. The

authorities of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of

that place, for such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I

have never seen in the streets of a civilized town. It was getting late

in the evening when we began our rounds. The principal collections of

the wounded were in the churches. Boards were laid over the tops of the

pews, on these some straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with

little or no covering other than such scanty clothes as they had on.

There were wounds of all degrees of severity, but I heard no groans

or murmurs. Most of the sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had

undergone amputation, and all had, I presume, received such attention as

was required. Still, it was but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that

the extemporized hospitals suggested. I could not help thinking the

patients must be cold; but they were used to camp-life, and did not

complain. The men who watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the

race. One of them was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw

one poor fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was

labored, and he was tossing, anxious and restless. The men were debating

about the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I happened

there at the right moment to see that he was well narcotized for the

night. Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on the straw in

one of these places? Certainly _possible_, but not probable; but as the

lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind of thrill that I

looked upon the features it illuminated. Many times, as I went from

hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I started as some faint

resemblance--the shade of a young man's hair, the outline of his

half-turned face-recalled the presence I was in search of. The face

would turn towards me and the momentary illusion would pass away, but

still the fancy clung to me. There was no figure huddled up on its rude

couch, none stretched at the road-side, none toiling languidly along

the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance, that I did not

scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was making my pilgrimage

to the battle-field.

"There are two wounded Secesh," said my companion. I walked to the

bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember

right, from North Carolina. He was of good family, son of a judge in

one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle,

intelligent. One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying helpless

and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards

those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in

deadly strife. The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this

Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race

in the men of the North and South, It would be worth a year of battles

to abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it

out were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of

slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully

among the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man

finished in the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his

forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict

against others of like training with his own,--a man who, but for the

curse that it is laid on our generation to expiate, would have been

a fellow-worker with them in the beneficent task of shaping the

intelligence and lifting the moral standard of a peaceful and united

people.

On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having engaged James Grayden

and his team, I set out with the Chaplain and the Philanthropist for

Keedysville. Our track lay through the South Mountain Gap and led us

first to the town of Boonsborough, where, it will be remembered, Colonel

Dwight had been brought after the battle. We saw the positions occupied

in the Battle of South Mountain, and many traces of the conflict. In one

situation a group of young trees was marked with shot, hardly one having

escaped. As we walked by the side of the wagon, the Philanthropist left

us for a while and climbed a hill, where along the line of a fence he

found traces of the most desperate fighting. A ride of some three hours

brought us to Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army-surgeon

who had charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little

sleep after his fatigues and watchings. He bore this cross very

creditably, and helped me to explore all places where my soldier might

be lying among the crowds of wounded. After the useless search, I

resumed my journey, fortified with a note of introduction to Dr.

Letterman, also with a bale of oakum which I was to carry to that

gentleman, this substance being employed as a substitute for lint.

We were obliged also to procure a pass to Keedysville from the

Provost-Marshal of Boonsborough. As we came near the place, we learned

that General McClellan's headquarters had been removed from this village

some miles farther to the front.

On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a familiar face and

figure blocked the way, like one of Bunyan's giants. The tall form and

benevolent countenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged to the

excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay, of Chelsea, who, like my Philanthropist,

only still more promptly, had come to succor the wounded of the great

battle. It was wonderful to see how his single personality pervaded this

torpid little village; he seemed to be the centre of all its activities.

All my questions he answered clearly and decisively, as one who knew

everything that was going on in the place. But the one question I had

come five hundred miles to ask,--_Where is Captain H.?_--he could not

answer. There were some thousands of wounded in the place, he told

me, scattered about everywhere. It would be a long job to hunt up my

Captain; the only way would be to go to every house and ask for him.

Just then, a medical officer came up.

"Do you know anything of Captain H., of the Massachusetts Twentieth?"

"Oh, yes; he is staying in that house. I saw him there, doing very

well."

A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself.

Now, then, for our twice-wounded volunteer, our young centurion whose

double-barred shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon. Let us

observe the proprieties, however; no swelling upward of the mother,--no

_hysterica passio,_--we do not like scenes. A calm salutation,--then

swallow and bold hard. That is about the programme.

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and white-washed. A

little yard before it, with a gate swinging. The door of the cottage

ajar,--no one visible as yet. I push open the door and enter. An old

woman, _Margaret Kitzmuller_ her name proves to be, is the first person

I see.

"Captain H. here?"

"Oh, no, Sir,--left yesterday morning for Hagerstown--in a milk-cart."

The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking ancient woman, answers

questions with a rising inflection, and gives a good account of the

Captain, who got into the vehicle without assistance, and was in

excellent spirits.--Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as the

terminus of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and was on his way to

Philadelphia _viâ_ Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already

in the hospitable home of Walnut Street, where his friends were

expecting him.

I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was die

same to Philadelphia through Harrisburg as through Baltimore. But it was

very difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of conveyance to

Hagerstown, and on the other hand I had James Grayden and his wagon to

carry me back to Frederick. It was not likely that I should overtake the

object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six hours start, even if I

could procure a conveyance that day, In the mean time James was getting

impatient to be on his return, according to the direction of his

employers. So I decided to go back with him.

But there was the great battle-field only about three miles from

Keedysville, and it was impossible to go without seeing that. James

Grayden's directions were peremptory, but it was a case for the higher

law. I must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours, such as

would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and enforce it by a personal

motive. I did this handsomely, and succeeded without difficulty. To

add brilliancy to my enterprise, I invited the Chaplain and the

Philanthropist to take a free passage with me.

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off

to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise

directions, over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek

in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did

not then know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we

met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had

picked up on the battle-field. Still wandering along, we were at last

pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was

covered with Indian-corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest

fighting of the day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to

make a passage across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last

few days looked like old roads. We passed a fresh grave under a tree

near the road. A board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well

as I could make it out, of Gardiner, of a New-Hampshire regiment.

On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks and

spades. "How many?" "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried, then,

in this region of the field of strife. We stopped the wagon, and,

getting out, began to look around us. Hard by was a large pile of

muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up and were

guarded for the Government. A long ridge of fresh gravel rose before us.

A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription, the first part of

which was, I believe, not correct:--"The Rebel General Anderson and 80

Rebels are buried in this hole." Other smaller ridges were marked with

the number of dead lying under them. The whole ground was strewed

with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets,

cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and

meat. I saw two soldiers' caps that looked as though their owners had

been shot through the head. In several places I noticed dark red patches

where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured

his life out on the sod. I then wandered about in the cornfield. It

surprised me to notice, that, though there was every mark of hard

fighting having taken place here, the Indian-corn was not generally

trodden down. One of our cornfields is a kind of forest, and even when

fighting, men avoid the tall stalks as if they were trees. At the edge

of this cornfield lay a gray horse, said to have belonged to a Rebel

colonel, who was killed near the same place. Not far off were two dead

artillery-horses in their harness. Another had been attended to by

a burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him; but his last

bed-clothes were too short, and his legs stuck out stark and stiff

from beneath the gravel coverlet. It was a great pity that we had no

intelligent guide to explain to us the position of that portion of the

two armies which fought over this ground. There was a shallow trench

before we came to the cornfield, too narrow for a road, as I should

think, too elevated for a water-course, and which seemed to have been

used as a rifle-pit; at any rate, there had been hard fighting in and

about it. This and the cornfield may serve to identify the part of the

ground we visited, if any who fought there should ever look over this

paper. The opposing tides of battle must have blended their waves at

this point, for portions of gray uniform were mingled with the "garments

rolled in blood" torn from our own dead and wounded soldiers. I picked

up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own,--but there was something

repulsive about the trodden and stained relics of the stale

battle-field. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left uncleared,

and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy

heel-taps. A bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a soldier's

belt, served well enough for mementos of my visit, with a letter which

I picked up, directed to Richmond, Virginia, its seal unbroken. "N.C.

Cleaveland County. E. Wright to J. Wright." On the other side, "A few

lines from W.L. Vaughn," who has just been writing for the wife to her

husband, and continues on his own account. The postscript, "tell John

that nancy's folks are all well and has a verry good Little Crop of corn

a growing." I wonder, if, by one of those strange chances of which I

have seen so many, this number or leaf of the "Atlantic" will not sooner

or later find its way to Cleveland County, North Carolina, and E.

Wright, widow of James Wright, and Nancy's folks get from these

sentences the last glimpse of husband and friend as he threw up his arms

and fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam? I will keep this stained

letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in my time, and my

pleasant North-Carolina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital will, perhaps,

look these poor people up, and tell them where to send for it.

On the battle-field I parted with my two companions, the Chaplain and

the Philanthropist. They were going to the front, the one to find his

regiment, the other to look for those who needed his assistance. We

exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses' heads

were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I saw them

no more. On my way back, I fell into talk with James Grayden. Born in

England, Lancashire; in this country since he was four years old. Had

nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't know what he should do, if

he lost her. Though so long in this country, he had all the simplicity

and childlike light-heartedness which belong to the Old World's people.

He laughed at the smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white

English teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he

had a very limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small

store of information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me.

His quiet animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits

of anxiety, and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don' know, Sir," better

than I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and

other very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the

second time. Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded

Colonel and his lady. She gave me a most touching account of all

the suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he

succeeded in finding a shelter, showing the terrible want of proper

means of transportation of the wounded after the battle. It occurred to

me, while at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the

first time in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with

whom the Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army-surgeon, a Highlander by birth,

educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating

talk. He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous

Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in

the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch

from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those

frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard,

who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light

of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of

Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and

the rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the "_sudabit

muitura_,--" and others,--also of our New-York Professor Carnochan's

handiwork, a specimen of which I once admired at the New York College.

But the Doctor was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed willing to

forget the present in the past: things went wrong, somehow, and the time

was out of joint with him.

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own

wide bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in Middletown.

Here I lay awake again another night. Close to the house stood an

ambulance in which was a wounded Rebel officer, attended by one of their

own surgeons. He was calling out in a loud voice, all night long, as

it seemed to me, "Doctor! Doctor! Driver! Water!" in loud, complaining

tones, I have no doubt of real suffering, but in strange contrast with

the silent patience which was the almost universal rule.

The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence,

trivial, but having its interest as one of a series. The Doctor and

myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on

the sofa. At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the

Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau, just

where I could put my hand upon it. I was the last of the three to rise

in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I found it was

gone. This was rather awkward,--not on account of the loss, but of the

unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must have taken it. I

must try to find out what it meant.

"By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern

matchbox?"

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise and

my great gratification, pulled out _two_ matchboxes exactly alike, both

printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he

had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into

his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In

memory of which event we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes.

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases of

_plagiarism_, of which I will mention one where my name figured. When a

little poem called "The Two Streams" was first printed, a writer in the

New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of it of borrowing

the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President Hopkins, of

Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as I

thought, a thief or catchpoll might well consider as establishing a

fair presumption that it was so borrowed. I was at the same time wholly

unconscious of ever having met with the discourse or the sentence which

the verses were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen or heard

either. Some time after this, happening to meet my eloquent cousin,

Wendell Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that _he_

had once used the special image said to be borrowed, in a discourse

delivered at Williamstown. On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan

Read, he informed me that _he_, too, had used the image, perhaps

referring to his poem called "The Twins." He thought Tennyson had used

it also. The parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated

in a passage attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the Boston "Evening

Transcript" for October 23d, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head,

speaks of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to

the Atlantic, one to the Pacific. I found the image running loose in my

mind, without a halter. It suggested itself as an illustration of

the will, and I worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School

Atlas.--The spores of a great many ideas are floating about in the

atmosphere. We no more know where all the growths of our mind came from

than where the lichens which eat the names off from the gravestones

borrowed the germs that gave them birth. The two match-boxes were just

alike, but neither was a plagiarism.

In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of James

Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his name

"Phillip Ottenheimer," and whose features at once showed him to be an

Israelite. I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk. So I

asked him many questions about his religion, and got some answers that

sound strangely in Christian ears. He was from Wittenberg, and had

been educated in strict Jewish fashion. From his childhood he had read

Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar otherwise. A young person of his

race lost caste utterly by marrying a Christian. The Founder of our

religion was considered by the Israelites to have been "a right smart

man, and a great doctor," But the horror with which the reading of the

New Testament by any young person of their faith would be regarded was

as great, I judged by his language, as that of one of our straitest

sectaries would be, if he found his son or daughter perusing the "Age of

Reason."

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires

struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find "Fair-View"

laid down about this point on a railroad-map. I wish some wandering

photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one, if

possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of steeples

nestles among the Maryland hills. The town had a poetical look from a

distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there. The first sign

I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as

confirming my remote impression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past,

Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the

attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my

parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as

_Spiritus Vini Gallici_. I took advantage of General Shriver's always

open door to write a letter home, but had not time to partake of his

offered hospitality. The railroad-bridge over the Monocacy had been

rebuilt since I passed through Frederick, and we trundled along over the

track toward Baltimore.

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had

ordered all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic

message from Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had arrived

at the former place, "wound doing well in good spirits expects to leave

soon for Boston," After all, it was no great matter; the Captain was, no

doubt, snugly lodged before this in the house called Beautiful, at ----

Walnut Street, where that "grave and beautiful damsel named Discretion"

had already welcomed him, smiling, though "the water stood in her eyes,"

and had "called out Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little

more discourse with him, had him into the family."

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the lady

of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable, and whose

benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the invalids I had

left suffering at Frederick. General Wool still walked the corridors,

inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his

breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind

offices. About the doors of the hotel the news-boys cried the papers in

plaintive, wailing tones, as different from the sharp accents of their

Boston counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern

breeze. To understand what they said was, of course, impossible to any

but an educated ear, and if I made out "Stoarr" and "Clipper," it was

because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising

coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third,

there beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his brave

wounded companions under that roof which covers a household of as noble

hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies. Back River, Bush River,

Gunpowder Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory

has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes

with their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,--the broad,

the beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,--the river of

Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where

"aye these sunny mountains half-way down

Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it lovely

to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified his fame

with the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame forever"?

The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a

great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting

in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's

dolphin,--also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the

season, and ducks of lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last! Drive fast, O colored man and brother, to

the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting

for the sound of the chariot-wheels which bring to his bedside the face

and the voice nearer than any save one to his heart in this his hour of

pain and weakness! Up a long street with white shutters and white steps

to all the houses. Off at right angles into another long street with

white shutters and white steps to all the houses. Off again at another

right angle into still another long street with white shutters and white

steps to all the houses. The natives of this city pretend to know one

street from another by some individual differences of aspect; but the

best way for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from

others is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.

This corner-house is the one. Ring softly,--for the Lieutenant-Colonel

lies there with a dreadfully wounded arm, and two sons of the family,

one wounded like the Colonel, one fighting with death in the fog of a

typhoid fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least sound you can

make. I entered the house, but no cheerful smile met me. The sufferers

were each of them thought to be in a critical condition. The fourth bed,

waiting its tenant day after day, was still empty. _Not a word from my

Captain._

Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank within me. Had he

been taken ill on the road, perhaps been attacked with those formidable

symptoms which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds that seemed to be

doing well enough, and was his life ebbing away in some lonely cottage,

nay, in some cold barn or shed, or at the way-side, unknown, uncared

for? Somewhere between Philadelphia and Hagerstown, if not at the latter

town, he must be, at any rate. I must sweep the hundred and eighty miles

between these places as one would sweep a chamber where a precious pearl

had been dropped. I must have a companion in my search, partly to help

me look about, and partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely.

_Charley_ said he would go with me,--Charley, my Captain's beloved

friend, gentle, but full of spirit and liveliness, cultivated, social,

affectionate, a good talker, a most agreeable letter-writer, observing,

with large relish of life, and keen sense of humor.

He was not well enough to go, some of the timid ones said; but he

answered by packing his carpet-bag, and in an hour or two we were on the

Pennsylvania Central Railroad in full blast for Harrisburg.

I should have been a forlorn creature but for the presence of my

companion. In his delightful company I half forgot my anxieties, which,

exaggerated as they may seem now, ware not unnatural after what I had

seen of the confusion and distress that had followed the great battle,

nay, which seem almost justified by the recent statement that "high

officers" were buried after that battle whose names were never

ascertained. I noticed little matters, as usual. The road was filled in

between the rails with cracked stones, such as are used for Macadamizing

streets. They keep the dust down, I suppose, for I could not think of

any other use for them. By-and-by the glorious valley which stretches

along through Chester and Lancaster Counties opened upon us. Much as I

had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the

uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me. The grazing pastures

were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle

looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the

fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this

region was called the England of Pennsylvania. The people whom we saw

were, like the cattle, well-nourished; the young women looked round and

wholesome.

"_Grass makes girls_," I said to my companion, and left him to work out

my Orphic saying, thinking to myself, that, as guano makes grass, it

was a legitimate conclusion that Jehaboe must be a nursery of female

loveliness.

As the train stopped at the different stations, I inquired at each

if they had any wounded officers. None as yet; the red rays of the

battle-field had not streamed off so far as this. Evening found us in

the cars; they lighted candles in spring-candlesticks; odd enough I

thought it in the land of oil-wells and unmeasured floods of kerosene.

Some fellows turned up the back of a seat so as to make it horizontal,

and began gambling or pretending to gamble; it looked as if they were

trying to pluck a young countryman; but appearances are deceptive,

and no deeper stake than "drinks for the crowd" seemed at last to

be involved. But remembering that murder has tried of late years to

establish itself as an institution in the cars, I was less tolerant of

the doings of these "sportsmen" who tried to turn our public conveyance

into a travelling Frascali. They acted as if they were used to it, and

nobody seemed to pay much attention to their manoeuvres.

We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the evening, and attempted to

find our way to the Jones House, to which we had been commended. By some

mistake, intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have been, or

purely accidental, we went to the Herr House instead. I entered my name

in the book, with that of my companion. A plain, middle-aged man stepped

up, read it to himself in low tones, and coupled to it a literary title

by which I have been sometimes known. He proved to be a graduate of

Brown University, and had heard a certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered

there a good many years ago. I remembered it, too; Professor Goddard,

whose sudden and singular death left such lasting regret, was the

Orator. I recollect that while I was speaking a drum went by the church,

and how I was disgusted to see all the heads near the windows thrust out

of them, as if the building were on fire. _Cedat armis toga._ The clerk

in the office, a mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite in

his manners, and did all he could to make us comfortable. He was of a

literary turn, and knew one of his guests in his character of author. At

tea, a mild old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next us. He,

too, had come hunting after his son, a lieutenant in a Pennsylvania

regiment. Of these, father and son, more presently.

After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief medical officer of

the hospitals in the place, who was staying at the Brady House. A

magnificent old toddy-mixer, Bardolphian in hue and stern of aspect, as

all grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to dive through the

features of men to the bottom of their souls and pockets to see whether

they are solvent to the amount of sixpence, answered my question by a

wave of one hand, the other being engaged in carrying a dram to his

lips. His superb indifference gratified my artistic feeling more than it

wounded my personal sensibilities. Anything really superior in its line

claims my homage, and this man was the ideal bar-tender, above all

vulgar passions, untouched by commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of

the liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all

those lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any

of the roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the cheap,

all-powerful substitute.

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having

slept for I don't know how many nights.

"Take my card up to him, if you please."

"This way, Sir."

A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not expected to be as

affable, when attacked in his bed, as a French princess of old time

at her morning-receptions. Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I entered,

without effusion, but without rudeness. His thick, dark moustache was

chopped off square at the lower edge of the upper lip, which implied a

decisive, if not a peremptory, style of character.

I am Doctor So-and-So. of Hub-town, looking after my wounded son. (I

gave my name and said _Boston_, of course, in reality.)

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features

growing cordial. Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly excused

his reception of me. The day before, as he told me, he had dismissed

from the service a medical man hailing from ----, Pennsylvania, bearing

my last name, preceded by the same two initials; and he supposed, when

my card came up, it was this individual who was disturbing his slumbers.

The coincidence was so unlikely _a priori_, unless some forlorn parent

without antecedents had named a child after me, that I could not help

cross-questioning the Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact

was just as he had said, even to the somewhat unusual initials. Dr.

Wilson very kindly furnished me all the information in his power,

gave me directions for telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every

disposition to serve me.

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old

gentleman in a very happy state. He had just discovered his son, in a

comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel. He thought that he

could probably give us some information which would prove interesting.

To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in company with our

kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see me as happy as

himself. He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and presently came down

to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P----, of the Pennsylvania ----th, was a very fresh,

bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent

injury received in action. A grape-shot, after passing through a post

and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not penetrating or

breaking. He had good news for me.

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through

Harrisburg, going East. He had conversed in the bar-room of this hotel

with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder, (it might be the

lower part of the neck,) and had his arm in a sling. He belonged to the

Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that he was a Captain, by

the two bars on his shoulder-strap. His name was my family-name; he was

tall and youthful, like my Captain. At four o'clock he left in the train

for Philadelphia. Closely questioned, the Lieutenant's evidence was as

round, complete, and lucid as a Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS! The Lord's name be praised! The dead pain in the

semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of stupid,

unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to man and

beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when the dam loses

her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped short. There was

a feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or cut a strangling

garter,--only it was all over my system. What more could I ask to assure

me of the Captain's safety? As soon as the telegraph-office opens

to-morrow morning, we will send a message to our friends in Philadelphia,

and get a reply, doubtless, which will settle the whole matter.

The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the message was sent accordingly.

In due time, the following reply was received:--

"Phil Sept 24 I think the report you have heard that W [the Captain] has

gone East must be an error we have not seen or heard of him here M L H"

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI! He _could_ not have passed through Philadelphia

without visiting the house called Beautiful, where he had been so

tenderly cared for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those whom

he loved were lying in grave peril of life or limb. Yet he _did_ pass

through Harrisburg, going East, going to Philadelphia, on his way

home. Ah, this is it! He must have taken the late night-train from

Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home. There is

such a train, not down in the guide-book, but we were assured of the

fact at the Harrisburg depot. By-and-by came the reply from Dr.

Wilson's telegraphic message: nothing had been heard of the Captain at

Chambersburg. Still later, another message came from our Philadelphia

friend, saying that he was seen on Friday last at the house of Mrs. K--,

a well-known Union lady, in Hagerstown. Now this could not be true, for

he did not leave Keedysville until Saturday; but the name of the lady

furnished a clue by which we could probably track him. A telegram was

at once sent to Mrs. K--, asking information. It was transmitted

immediately, but when the answer would be received was uncertain, as the

Government almost monopolized the line. I was, on the whole, so well

satisfied that the Captain had gone East, that, unless something were

heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the late train,

leaving a little after midnight for Philadelphia.

This same morning we visited several of the temporary hospitals,

churches and school-houses, where the wounded were lying. In one of

these, after looking round as usual, I asked aloud, "Any Massachusetts

men here?" Two bright faces lifted themselves from their pillows and

welcomed me by name. The one nearest me was private John B. Noyes, of

Company B, Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of my old college class-tutor,

now the reverend and learned Professor of Hebrew, etc., in Harvard

University. His neighbor was Corporal Armstrong, of the same Company.

Both were slightly wounded, doing well. I learned then and since from

Mr. Noyes that they and their comrades were completely overwhelmed

by the attentions of the good people of Harrisburg,--that the ladies

brought them fruits and flowers, and smiles, better than either,--and

that the little boys of the place were almost fighting for the privilege

of doing their errands. I am afraid there will be a good many hearts

pierced in this war that will have no bullet-mark to show.

There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to

Camp Curtin might lighten some of them. A rickety wagon carried us to

the camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a basket of

good things with her for a sick brother, "Poor boy! he will be sure to

die," she said. The rustic sentries uncrossed their muskets and let

us in. The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with hills, spacious,

well-kept apparently, but did not present any peculiar attraction for

us. The visit would have been a dull one, had we not happened to get

sight of a singular-looking set of human beings in the distance. They

were clad in stuff of different hues, gray and brown being the leading

shades, but both subdued by a neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize

the variegated apparel of travel-stained vagabonds. They looked slouchy,

listless, torpid,--an ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of

such fellows as an old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a

broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery army which has given

our generals so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a by-stander told

us. A talk with them might be profitable and entertaining. But they were

tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of the

line which separated us from them.

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were referred.

Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for

anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it,

and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit

_hari-kari_. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend

as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian

origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch

type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious in the

hold, and calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make fast

time. He must have been in politics at some time or other, for he made

orations to all the "Secesh," in which he explained to them that the

United States considered and treated them like children, and enforced

upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels' attempting to do

anything against such a power as that of the National Government.

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered

somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly talk

with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help feeling a

kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion

as one is like to find under the stars and stripes. It is fair to take

a man prisoner. It is fair to make speeches to a man. But to take a man

prisoner and then make speeches to him while in durance is _not_ fair.

I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to something

but for the reason assigned.

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay

pipe in his mouth. He was a Scotchman from Ayr, _dour_ enough, and

little disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa

Briggs," and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns." He

professed to feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting,

and was in the army, I judged, only from compulsion. There was a

wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who

looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was. I give my

questions and his answers literally.

"What State do you come from?"

"Georgy."

"What part of Georgia?"

"_Midway_."

--[How odd that is! My father was settled for seven years as pastor

over the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a

grandson or great-grandson of one of his parishioners.]--

"Where did you go to church, when you were at home?"

"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."

"What did you do before you became a soldier?"

"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-bye 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 on some remote picket 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 'tis 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 _façade_ 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 Caffè 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 funeral 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 H K_ ----."

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 _naïveté_ 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 lockjaw. 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 _employé_ 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 youth, 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 do, 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. It is not a breeding-place

of ideas, which makes it a more agreeable residence for average people.

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 that turns neither 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 Areturus, 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 know 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 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 Ixion, 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 Eccentric 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 6th 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 haycocks 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 dure_ 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 Diedalian 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 sea-side 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

capstone 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-hilled 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.

WAITING.

Drop, falling fruits and crispèd leaves!

Ye tone a note of joy to me;

Through the rough wind my soul sails free,

nigh over waves that Autumn heaves.

Such quickening is in Nature's death,

Such life in every dying day,--

The glowing year hath lost her sway,

Since Freedom waits her parting breath.

I watch the crimson maple-boughs,

I know by heart each burning leaf,

Yet would that like a barren reef

Stripped to the breeze those arms uprose!

Under the flowers my soldier lies!

But come, thou chilling pall of snow,

Lest he should hear who sleeps below

The yet unended captive cries!

Fade swiftly, then, thou lingering year!

Test with the storms our eager powers;

For chains are broken with the hours,

And Freedom walks upon thy bier.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Eyes and Ears_. By HENRY WARD BEECHER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, pp.

419.

There is perhaps no man in America more widely known, more deeply loved,

and more heartily hated than the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. This

little book, fragmentary and desultory as it is, gives us a key

wherewith to unlock the mystery both of the extent of his influence and

the depth of the feelings which he excites. It is but a shower of petals

flung down by a frolicsome May breeze; but the beauty and brilliancy

of their careless profusion furnish a hint of the real strength and

substance and fruitfulness of the tree from which they sprang.

Within the compass of some four hundred pages we have about one hundred

articles, most of which had previously appeared in weekly newspapers.

They embrace, of course, every variety of subject,--grave and gay,

practical and poetical. They are not such themes as come to a man

in silence and solitude, to be wrought out with deep and deliberate

conscientiousness; they are rather such as He around one in his outgoing

and his incoming, in the field and by the way-side, overlooked by the

preoccupied multitude, but abundantly patent to the few who will not

permit the memories or the hopes of life to thrust away its actualities,

and, once pointed out, full of interest and amusement even to the

absorbed and hitherto unconscious throngs. We have here no pale-browed,

far-sighted philosopher, but a ruddy-faced, high-spirited man,

cheerful-tempered, yet not _equilibrious_, susceptible to annoyance,

capable of wrathful outbursts, with eyes to see all sweet sights, ears

to hear all sweet sounds, and lips to sing their loveliness to others,

and also with eyes and ears and lips just as keen to distinguish and

just as hold to denounce the sights and sounds that are unlovely;--and

this man, with his ringing laugh and his springing step, walks cheerily

to and fro in his daily work, striking the rocks here and there by the

way-side with his bright steel hammer, eliciting a shower of sparks from

each, and then on to the next. It is not the serious business of his

life, but its casual and almost careless experiments. He does not wait

to watch effects. You may gather up the brushwood and build yourself

a fire, if you like. His part of the affair is but a touch and go,--

partly for love and partly for fun.

There are places where a severer taste, or perhaps only a more careful

revision, would have changed somewhat. At times an exuberance of spirits

carries him to the very verge of coarseness, but this is rare and

exceptional. The fabric may be slightly ravelled at the ends and

slightly rough at the selvedge, but in the main it is fine and smooth

and lustrous as well as strong. A coarse nature carefully clipped and

sheared and fashioned down to the commonplace of conventionality will

often exhibit a negative refinement, while a mind of real and subtile

delicacy, but of rugged and irrepressible individuality, will

occasionally shoot out irregular and uncouth branches. Yet between the

symmetry of the one and the spontaneity of the other the choice cannot

be doubtful. We are not defending coarseness in any guise. It is always

to be assailed, and never to be defended. It is always a detriment,

and never an ornament. No excellence can justify it. No occasion can

palliate it. But coarseness is of two kinds,--one of the surface, and

one in the grain. The latter is pervading and irremediable. It touches

nothing which it does not deface. It makes all things common and

unclean. It grows more repulsive as the roundness of youth falls away

and leaves its harsh features more sharply outlined. But the other

coarseness is only the overgrowth of excellence,--the rankness of lusty

life. It is vigor run wild. It is a fault, but it is local and temporal.

Culture corrects it. As the mind matures, as experience accumulates,

as the vision enlarges, the coarseness disappears, and the rich and

healthful juices nourish instead a playful and cheerful serenity that

illumines strength with a softened light, that disarms opposition and

delights sympathy, that shines without dazzling and attracts without

offending.

Here arises a fear lest the apologetic nature of our remarks may seem to

indicate a much greater need of apology than actually exists. We have

been led into this line of remark, not so much by a perusal of the

book under consideration, in which, indeed, there is very little, if

anything, to offend, as by the nature of the objections which we have

most frequently heard against this author's productions, both written

and spoken. We do not even confine ourselves to defence, but go farther,

and question whether the allegations of coarseness may not oftener

be the fault of the plaintiff than of the defendant. Is there not a

conventional standard of refinement which measures things by its own

arbitrary self, and finds material for displeasure in what is really

but a sincere and almost unconscious rendering of things as they exist?

There are facts which modern fastidiousness justly enough commands to he

wrapped around with graceful drapery before they shall have audience.

But do we not commit a trespass against virtue, when we demand the same

soft disguises to drape facts whose disguise is the worst immorality,

whose naked hideousness is the only decency, which must be seen

disgusting to warrant their being seen at all? So Mr. Beecher has been

censured for irreverence, when what was called his irreverence has

seemed to us but the tenderness engendered of close connection. Cannot

one live so near to God as that His greatness shall he merged in His

goodness? What would be irreverence, if it came from the head, may be

but love springing up warm from the heart.

One of the strongest characteristics of Mr. Beecher's mind, the one that

has, perhaps, the strongest influence in producing his power over men,

is his quick insight into common things, his quick sympathy with common

minds. He knows common dangers. He understands common interests. He

is sensitive to common sorrows. He appreciates common joys. Without

necessarily being practical himself, he is full of practical

suggestions. He is a leveller; but he levels up, not down. He

continually seeks to lift men from the plane of mere toil and thrift to

the loftier levels of aspiration. He would disinthrall them from what is

low, and introduce them to the freedom of the heights. He would bring

them out of the dungeons of the senses into the domains of taste and

principles. He believes in man, and he battles for men. With him,

humanity is chief: science, art, wealth are its handmaidens. Yet,

writing for ordinary people, he never falls into the sin of declaiming

against extraordinary ones. No part of his power over the poor is

obtained by inveighing against the rich, as no part of his power over

the rich is obtained by pandering to their prejudices or their passions.

He builds up no influence for himself on the ruins of another man's

influence. The elevation which he aims to produce is real, not

factitious,--absolute, not relative. It is the elevation to be obtained

by ascending the mountain, not by digging it away so that the valley

seems no longer low by contrast.

For the manner of his teaching, he is not always gentle, but he is

always sincere. He speaks soft words to persuade; but if that is not

enough, he does not scruple to knock the muck-rake out of sordid hands

with a fine, sudden stroke, if so he may make men look up from the

rubbish under their feet to the flowers that bloom around them and the

stars that glow above and the God that reigns over all.

Thinking of the multitudes of hard-working, weary-hearted people whom he

weekly met with these words of cheer: sometimes homely advice on homely

things; sometimes wise counsels in art; sometimes tender lessons from

Nature; sometimes noble words from his own earnest soul; sometimes

sympathy in sorrow; sometimes strength in weakness; sometimes only the

indirect, but real help that comes from the mere distraction wrought

by his sportiveness, and wild, winsome mirth; but all kindly, hearty,

honest, sympathetic,--indignation softening, even while it surges,

into pity and love, and itself finding or framing excuses for the very

outrage which it lashes: thinking of this, we do not marvel that he has

furrowed for himself so deep a groove in so many hearts. Nor, on the

other hand, is it difficult to see, even from so genial a book as this,

whence polemics are not so much banished as where there is no niche for

them, should they apply, why it is that he is so fiercely opposed.

When a man like Mr. Beecher encounters that which excites his moral

disapprobation, there is no possibility of mistaking him. He flings

himself against it with all the strength and might of his manly,

uncompromising nature. There is no coquetting with the proprieties, no

toning down of objurgation to meet the requirements of personal dignity,

but an audacious and aggressive repugnance of the whole man to the

meanness or malignity. And the very clearness of his vision gives

terrible power to his vituperation. With his keen, bright eye he sees

just where the vulnerable spot is, and with his firm, strong hand he

sends the arrow in. The victim writhes and reels and--does not love the

marksman. And as the victim has a large circle of relatives by birth and

marriage, he inoculates them with his own animosity; and so, at a safe

distance, Mr. Beecher is sometimes considerably torn in pieces. Yet we

have no doubt that by far the greater number of these opponents would,

if once fairly brought within the circle of his influence, acknowledge

the truth as well as the force of his principles; and certainly it is a

matter of surprise that a man with such a magnificent mastery of all the

weapons of attack and defence should be so sparing and discreet in their

use as is Mr. Beecher. In this book, compiled of articles thrown off

upon the spur of the moment, with so much to amuse, to awaken, to

suggest, and to inspire, there is hardly a sentence which can arouse

antagonism or inflict pain. You may not agree with his conclusions, but

you cannot resist his good nature.

Long may he live to do yeoman's service in the cause of the beautiful

and the true!

_History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France from

A.D. 1807 to A.D. 1814._ By MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W.F.P. NAPIER, K.C.B.,

etc. In Five Volumes, with Portraits and Plans. New York: W.J.

Widdleton.

A new edition of the great military history of Sir William Napier,

printed in the approved luxurious style which the good examples of the

Cambridge University Press have made a necessity with all intelligent

book-purchasers, calls at the present time for a special word of

recognition. Of the merits and character of the work itself it is

scarcely required that we should speak. An observer of, and participant

in, the deeds which he describes, cautious, deliberate, keen-sighted,

candid, and unsparing, General Napier's book has qualities seldom united

in a single production. Southey wrote an eloquent history of the War in

the Peninsula, perhaps as good a history as an author well-trained in

compositions of the kind could be expected to produce at a distance.

But that was its defect. It lacked that knowledge and judgment of a

complicated series of events which could be acquired only on the field

and by one possessed of consummate military training. On the other hand,

we can seldom look for any laborious work of authorship from a general

in active service. Men of action exhaust their energies in doing, and

are usually impatient of the slow process of unwinding the tangled skein

of events which at the moment they had been compelled to cut with the

sword. It is by no means every campaign which furnishes the Commentaries

of its Caesar. To Sir William Napier, however, we are indebted for a

work which has taken its place as a model history of modern campaigning.

The protracted struggle of the Peninsular War through six full years

of skilful operations, conducted by the greatest masters of military

science, in a country whose topographical features called out the rarest

resources of the art of war, at a time when the military system of

Napoleon was at its height, summing up the experience of a quarter of

a century in France of active military pursuits,--the story of sieges,

marches, countermarches, lines of retreat and defence, followed by the

most energetic assaults, blended with the disturbing political elements

of the day at home and the contrarieties of the battle-field amidst a

population foreign to both armies,--certainly presented a subject or

series of subjects calculated to tax the powers of a conscientious

writer to the uttermost. To furnish such a narrative was the work

undertaken by General Napier. Sixteen years of unintermitted toil were

given by him to the task. He spared no labor of research. Materials were

placed at his disposal by the generals of both armies, by Soult and

Wellington. The correspondence left behind in Spain by Joseph Bonaparte,

written in three languages and partly in cipher of which the key had

to be discovered, was patiently arranged, translated, and at length

deciphered by Lady Napier, who also greatly assisted her husband in

copying his manuscript, which, from the frequent changes made, was in

effect transcribed three times. By such labors was the immense mass

of contemporary evidence brought into order, clearly narrated, and

submitted to exact scientific criticism. For it is the distinguishing

characteristic of the book, that it is a critical history, constantly

illuminating facts by principles and deducing the most important maxims

of political and military science from the abundant material lavishly

contributed by the virtues, follies, and superabundant exertions of

three great nations in the heart of Europe, in the midst of the complex

civilization of the nineteenth century. The ever earnest, animated style

in which all this is written grows out of the subject and is supported

by it, always rising naturally with the requirements of the occasion. If

our officers in the field would learn how despatches should be written

and a record of their exploits be prepared to catch the ear of

posterity, let them give their leisure hours of the camp to the study

of Napier. The public also may learn many lessons of patience and

philosophy from these pages, when they turn from the book to the actual

warfare writing its ineffaceable characters on so many fair fields of

our own land.

_The Patience of Hope_. By the Author of "A Present Heaven." With an

Introduction by JOHN G. WHITTIER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

As the method by which an individual soul reaches conclusions with

regard to the Saviour and the conditions of salvation, "The Patience of

Hope" is worthy of particular attention. It does not, however, stand

alone, but belongs to a class. Its peculiarity is that it proceeds

by apposite text and inference, more than by the illumination of

feeling,--aiming to convince rather than to reveal, as is the manner of

those whose convictions have not quite become as a star in a firmament

where neither eclipse nor cloud ever comes. Evidently there was a most

searching examination of the Scriptures preparatory to the work; and yet

the ample quotation, often fresh and felicitous, appears to be made to

sustain a preconceived opinion, or, more strictly, an emotion. This

emotion is so single and absorbing that there is some gleam of it in

each varying view, and every sentiment is warm with it, however the

flame may lurk as beneath a crust of lava. Only from a richly gifted

mind, and a heart whose longings no fullness of mortal affection has

power to permanently appease, could these aspirations issue. It is the

tender complaint and patient hope of one whom the earth, and all that

is therein, cannot satisfy. Moreover, so pure and irrepressible is the

natural desire of the heart, so does it color and constitute all

the dream of Paradise, that the divinest Hope not only thrills and

palpitates with Love's ripest imaginings, but puts on nuptial robes.

Touchingly she pictures herself as "The Mystic Spouse,--her that cometh

up from the wilderness, leaning upon the arm of her Beloved,--and we

shall see that she, like her Lord, is wounded in her heart, her hands,

and her feet." Though sowing in such still remembered pain, she yet

reaps with unspeakable joy. She has now the full assurance that the

mystic and immortal embrace is for her, and in the fulness of her heart

cries, "When were Love's arms stretched so wide as upon the Cross?"

It is in keeping with such an aspiration that this and kindred natures

should perceive in Christianity the sacred mystery from which is to be

drawn, in the world to come, the full fruition of the tenderest and

most vital impulse of the human heart, and therefore to be most fitly

meditated and vividly anticipated in cloistered seclusion. Throughout

their revelations there is a yearning for Infinite Love; and ardent

receptivity is regarded as the true condition for the conception and

enjoyment of religion. It is clear that they have a passion, sublimated

and glorified indeed, but still a passion, for Christ. This is the

mightiest impulse to that exaltation of His person against which the

calm and consummate reasoner contends in vain. Truly we are fearfully

and wonderfully made! The soul is touched with the strong necessity of

loving; and its power becomes intense and inappeasable in proportion to

the capacity of the heart; and yet some of the greatest of those have

reposed so supremely in the innate and ineffable Ideal that to the

uninitiated they have seemed in their serenity as pulseless as pearls.

Through this sublime influence lovely women have become nuns, and

have lived and died saints, that they might continually indulge and

constantly cherish the blissful hope of being, in some spiritual form,

the brides of Jesus. A long line of these, coeval with the Crucifixion,

have passed on in maiden meditation, and so were fancy-free from all of

mortal mould. This ecstatic dreaming is so charming, and so insatiable

withal, that it seems to those who entertain it a divine vision. It is

an enchantment so complete that Reason cannot penetrate its circle, and

Logic has never approached it. Doubtless this fond aspiration finds

freest and fairest expression in the Roman Church,--a communion that not

only encourages, but enjoins, the adoration of the Virgin, in order that

certain enthusiasts among men may also aspire to the skies on the wings

of pure, yet passionate love.

The ready objection to this course of life is that it leads to solitude.

It wins the devotee apart, and away from the influences to that

universal brotherhood whereto Philanthropy fondly turns as the finest

manifestation of the spirit of the Redeemer. And yet they are equally

the fruits of His coming. Without the perfect Man the sublimest

endurance and most marvellous aspiration of Hope would never have found

development below. Now it has become a power that so pervades the bosoms

of sects that they accept its soaring wing as one to which the heaven

of heavens is open. This, certainly, is the greatest triumph that human

nature has achieved over those who have systematically depreciated it;

inasmuch as it is a heightening, not a change of heart. Verily, Love is

stronger than Death; and in its complete presence or utter absence,

here or hereafter, there is and will be the extreme of bliss or bale.

Therefore it is in the affections to lead those sweetly and swiftly

heavenward who singly seek the immortal way. So guided and inspired, it

cannot but be a charming path; for those who perpetually walk therein

come to look as though they were entranced with the perfume that

floats from fields of asphodel. Characters so developed are beautiful

exceedingly, and seem of a far higher strain than those who most

generously and effectively labor for the amelioration and moral

advancement of the race. They, more than any others who have riches

there, illumine the grand, yet gloomy arches of the Christian Church

with their ineffable whiteness. No preacher therein is so eloquent as

their marble silence; for they reveal in their countenances the mystery

of Redemption. Even while among the living, men looked upon them with

awe,--feeling, that, though coeval in time, infinite space rolled

between. They teach as no other order of teachers can, that the days and

duties of life may be so cast under foot as to exalt one to be only a

little lower than the angels. In fine, through them is made visible the

value of the individual soul; and thus we see, as in the central idea of

our author, that "that which moulds itself from within is free."

_Jenkins's Vest-Pocket Lexicon_. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

Compared with "Webster's Unabridged" or "Worcester's Quarto," this

little pinch of words would make "small show." It is, however, a very

valuable pocket-companion; for, to use the author's own phrase, it

"omits what everybody knows, contains what everybody wants to know and

cannot readily find." It is really a _vade-mecum_, small, cheap, and

useful to a degree no one can fully appreciate until it has been

thoroughly tried. Mr. Jabex Jenkins may claim younger-brotherhood with

the men who have done service in the important department of education

he has chosen to enter.

_A Practical Guide to the Study of the Diseases of the Eye; their

Medical and Surgical Treatment_. By HENRY W. WILLIAMS, M.D. Boston:

Ticknor & Fields. 12mo. pp. 317.

If we readily accord our gratitude to those whose skilful hands and

well-instructed judgment render us physical service in our frequent

need, ought we not to offer additional thanks to such as by the

high tribute of their mental efforts confirm and elucidate the more

mechanical processes required in doing their beneficent work?

Do those who enjoy unimpaired vision, and who have not yet experienced

the sufferings arising from any of the varied forms of ocular disease,

appreciate the magnitude of the blessing vouchsafed to them? We venture

to answer in the negative.

Occasionally, the traveller by railway has a more or less severe hint

as to what an inflamed and painful eye may bring him to endure: those

countless flying cinders which blacken his garments and draw unsightly

lines upon his face with their slender charcoal-pencils do not always

leave him thus comparatively unharmed. Suppose one unluckily reaches the

eyeball just as the redness has faded from its sharp angles,--do we not

all know how the rest of that journey is one intolerable agony, unless

some fellow-traveller knows how to remove the offending substance? And

even then how the blistered, delicate surface yearns for a soothing

_douche_ of warm water,--perhaps not to be enjoyed for hours!

From slighter troubles, through all the more serious and dangerous

states arising from injury or produced by spontaneous or specifically

aroused inflammation, to the wonderful operations devised to give sight,

when the clear and beautiful lens has become clouded, or the delicate

muscular meshes of the iris are bound down or drawn together so as to

close the pupil and shut out the visible world, the learned and skilful

operator comes to our aid, a veritable messenger of mercy. To be

deprived of sight,--who can fully appreciate this melancholy condition,

save those who have been in danger of such a fate, or have had actual

experience of it, though only temporarily? Such a misfortune is

universally allowed to be worse, by far, than congenital blindness. And

this is not difficult to understand. The eyes that have been permitted

to drink in the varied hues of the landscape, and to gaze with such

delight upon the celestial revelations spread out nightly above and

around them, are indeed in double darkness when all this power and

privilege are swept away, it may be forever. The astronomer can truly

estimate the value of healthy eyes.

In looking over again, after a thorough perusal some time since, the

admirable work which forms the theme of this notice, we could not

resist the impulse to call attention to the infinite uses, unbounded

importance, and inestimable value of the organs of vision; and we have

no fear but our postulate in regard to the manner in which we should all

prize their conservators will be heartily acceded to.

This is hardly the place in which to enter into a minute professional

examination of this new volume. If we advert generally to its purpose,

and point out the undoubted benefits its recommendations and teaching

are destined to confer, both upon those who are sufferers,--or who will

be, unless they heed its warnings,--and upon the practitioners who

devote either an exclusive or a general attention to the diseases of the

eye, the end we have in view will be partially attained,--and fully so,

if the author's convincing instructions are brought into that universal

adoption which they not only eminently deserve, but must command. Let us

hope that the clear style, sensible advice, and valuable information,

derived from so varied an experience as that which has been enjoyed by

our author, will have a wide and growing influence in the extensive

field of professional ministrations demanded by this class of

cases,--for, let it be remembered, and reverently be it written, "THE

LIGHT OF THE BODY IS THE EYE."

The distinctive aim of the author--and which is kept constantly in

view--is the simplifying both of the classification and the treatment

of the diseases of the eye. We know of no volume which could more

appropriately and beneficially be put into the hands of the medical

student, nor any which could meet a more appreciative welcome from

the busy practitioner. The former cannot, at the tender age of his

professional life, digest the ponderous masses of ocular lore which

adorn the shelves of the maturer student's library; and the latter,

while he is glad to have these elaborate works at his command for

reference, is refreshed by a perusal of a few pages of the more

unpretending, but not less valuable _vade-mecum_.

While the professional reader will peruse this book with pleasure as

well as profit, there are many points and paragraphs of great value to

everybody. We advise every one to look over these pages, and we promise

that many valuable hints will be gained in reference to the various

ailments and casualties which are constantly befalling the eye. It is

well in this world to become members of a Mutual-Assistance Society, and

help one another out of trouble as often as we can. In order to do this,

we must know how; and, in many cases, a little aid in mishaps such as

are likely to occur to the eye may prevent a vast deal of subsequent

injury and pain.

We cannot but refer to the singular good sense of the author in

pressing upon his reader's attention the mischief so often wrought,

hitherto,--and we fear still frequently brought about,--by

_over-activity_ of treatment. Especially does this find its

exemplification in the care of traumatic injuries of the eye. Rashness

and heroic measures in these cases are as unfortunate for the patient as

are the well-meant efforts of friends, when a foreign substance has been

inserted into the ear or nose, or a needle broken off in the flesh: what

was at first an easily remedied matter becomes exceedingly difficult,

tedious, and painful, after various pokings, pushings, and squeezings.

The author's experience in cases of cataract makes his observations upon

that affection as valuable as they are clear and to the purpose. The

same is true with regard to the use and abuse of spectacles.

A short account of that interesting and most important instrument, the

Opthalmoscope, will command the attention of the general reader.

Finally, we notice with peculiar satisfaction the elegant dress in which

the volume appears. A very marked feature of this is the agreeable tint

given to the paper, so much to be preferred to the glaring snowy white

which has been so long the rule with publishers everywhere. This is

especially befitting a volume whose object is the alleviation of ocular

distress, and we venture to say will meet with the commendation of every

reader. A similar shade was adopted, some time since, by the publishers

of "The Ophthalmic Hospital Reports," London, at the suggestion, we

think, of its accomplished editor, Mr. Streatfeild.

_Country Living and Country Thinking_. By GAIL HAMILTON. Boston: Ticknor

& Fields. 12mo.

Our impression of this volume is that it contains some of the most

charming essays in American literature. The authoress, who chooses to

conceal her real name under the _alias_ of "Gail Hamilton," is not

only womanly, but a palpable individual among women. Both sex and

individuality are impressed on every page.

That the hook is written by a woman is apparent by a thousand signs.

That it proceeds from a distinct and peculiar personality, as well as

from a fertile and vigorous intellect, is no less apparent. The writer

has evidently looked at life through her own eyes, and interpreted it

through her own experience. Her independence becomes at times a kind of

humorous tartness, and she finds fault most delightfully. So cant

and pretence, however cunningly disguised by accredited maxims and

accredited sentimentality, can for a moment deceive her sharp insight

or her fresh sensibility. This primitive power and originality are not

purchased by any sacrifice of the knowledge derived at second-hand

through books, for she is evidently a thoughtful and appreciative

student of the best literature; but they proceed from a nature so strong

that it cannot be overcome and submerged by the mental forces and food

it assimilates.

Individuality implies will, and will always tends to wilfulness. The two

are harmonized in humor. Gail Hamilton is a humorist in her wilfulness,

and flashes suggestive thought and wisdom even in her most daring

caprices and eccentricities of individual whim. She is wild in

sentences, heretical in paragraphs, thoroughly orthodox in essays.

Her mind is really inclosed by the most rigid maxims of Calvinistic

theology, while, within that circle, it frisks and plays in the oddest

and wittiest freaks. A grave and religious earnestness is at the

foundation of her individuality, and she is so assured of this fact that

she can safely indulge in wilful gibes at pretension in all its most

conventionally sacred forms. This bright audacity is the perfection of

moral and intellectual health. No morbid nature, however elevated in

its sentiments, would dare to hazard such keen and free remarks as Gail

Hamilton scatters in careless profusion.

When this intellectual caprice approaches certain definite limits, it is

edifying to witness the forty-person power of ethics and eloquence she

brings readily up to the rescue of the sentiments she at first seemed

bent on destroying. As her style throughout is that of brilliant,

animated, and cordial conversation, flexible to all the moods of the

quick mind it so easily and aptly expresses, the reader is somewhat

puzzled at times to detect the natural logic which regulates her

transitions from gay to grave, from individual perceptions to general

laws; but the geniality and heartiness which flood the whole book with

life and meaning soon reconcile him to the peculiar processes of the

intellect whose startling originality and freshness give him so much

pleasure.

It would be unjust not to say that beneath all the fantastic play of her

wit and humor there is constantly discernible an earnest purpose. Sense

and sagacity are everywhere visible. The shrewdest judgments on ordinary

life and character are as abundant as the quaint fancies with which they

are often connected. But in addition to all that charms and informs, the

thoughtful reader will find much that elevates and invigorates. A noble

soul, contemptuous of everything mean and base, loving everything grand

and magnanimous, is the real life and inspiration of the book.

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