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PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. ...............................................................................................1

Oliver Wendell Holmes...........................................................................................................................1

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. ........................................................................................................1

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." ..................................................................................................6

THE INEVITABLE TRIAL..................................................................................................................30

CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. ...........................................................................................................45

THE PULPIT AND THE PEW.............................................................................................................53

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace. It is our ultimatum, as that was

theirs. They must have something to eat, and the circusshows to look at. We must have something to eat,

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our carriages, stay away from Newport or

Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new dresses and

bonnets and everyday luxuries which we can dispense with. If the young Zouave of the family looks smart

in his new uniform, its respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a carawayumbel late in

the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying

a new one, if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic

economy of the time. Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the

common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what

would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have experienced some very profound impression,

which will sooner or later betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among us. We

cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the

consequence of the terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec tells

the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the severest

penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after their entrance,

so that, in the course of his ten years' attendance, all the inmates died out two or three times, and were

replaced by new ones. He does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered to those

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous system as a consequence of the war

excitement in noncombatants. Take the first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad disaster

to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of two gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen

complained of a sudden feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, changed color,

and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients say,

went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of such

trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more serious

cause. An old, gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba. One of

our early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was thought to have had his attack mainly in

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,what a devouring passion it becomes in those whom

it assails. Patriotism is the fire of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of adventure, the

contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of participating in the great events of the time, the desire

of personal distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we often witness, turning the

most peaceful of our youth into the most ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different

form reaches a good many noncombatants, who have no thought of losing a drop of precious blood

belonging to themselves or their families. Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they

are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their

ordinary business. They stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We confessed to

an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke

out. It was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light of the

terrible present. Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at

the same time that we had closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more than we

could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read

the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if

he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of

the fever is over? Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the noon extra,he is

so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin board, and then in

When any startling piece of warnews comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do.

The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make

up the grand army of a stageshow. Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a

day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years. This

accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for

that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated

by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as through all those which we

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not wholly blessed, either; for what is more

painful than the awaking from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we cannot

at first think what,and then groping our way about through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full

upon the misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us on its

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the

trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a dream,if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and shake

themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole

ourselves out of an ugly fact always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the

Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,at least, he suspects himself of indisposition. Nothing

serious,let us just rub our forefeet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs his hands,

and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No!

all is not quite right yet. Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought to be. Let us settle that where it

should be, and then we shall certainly be in good trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old lady adjusts

her cap, and passes his forepaw over it like a kitten washing herself. Poor fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact,

that he has to deal with. If he could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were

FlyPaper. So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we dream! Perhaps very young

persons may not understand this; as we grow older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of old habits. The newspaper is as

imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must

go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of afterdinner nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us

in company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine right of

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of Americans. Our own nearest relation in the

ascending line remembers the Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll, which

was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that time growing uncomfortable by reason of

cannonballs dropping in from the neighboring heights at all hours,in token of which see the tower of

Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As for the brush of 1812, "we did not

think much about that"; and everybody knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in

its political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us who are not in the last quarter of their century. We

are learning many strange matters from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of

existence which make war as it is with us very different from war as it has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole nation is now penetrated by the

ramifications of a network of iron nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and

from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body. The second is the vast

system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What

was the railroadforce which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of April but a contraction and

extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous action, keeps us always alive with

excitement. It is not a breathless courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight of

for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know for a week of some great engagement, but

almost hourly paragraphs, laden with truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always for the

last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of our armies. Tonight the stout lumbermen of

Maine are encamped under their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the

tobaccofields and the slavepens of Virginia. The war passion burned like scattered coals of fire in the

households of Revolutionary times; now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And this

instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of

public opinion. We may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a week afterwards

it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would have been in a whole season before our national nervous

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better

before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and goodwill towards all mankind, we have felt twinges of conscience

about the passage,especially when one of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build

and keep as a college, and that every porthole we could stop would give us a new professor. Now we begin

to think that there was some meaning in our poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we

can be and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all back upon our substantial

human qualities, for a long time more or less kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art,

science, or literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social distinctions which keep generous souls

apart from each other, than the preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out that

not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully equalized under

the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is

the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen

puts off his strawcolored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he

is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were illdressed and his hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"whom a critic in groundglass spectacles (the same who grasps his statistics by

the blade and strikes at his supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the, "bloated

aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only

birthright is an aptitude for learning,even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of an

organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their courage is big enough for the uniform which

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our windows. A few days afterwards

a field piece was dragged to the water's edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who

looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall," he said, and so bring the drowned

person to the surface. A strange physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our present

point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the surface when the great guns of war shake the

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable grave. But the wrecks of precious

virtues, which had been covered with the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and

unheardof things, which had lain unseen during our national life of fourscore years, came up and are coming

up daily, shaken from their bed by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not unwilling to say that they believed

the old valor of Revolutionary times had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern

people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the French,Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be

remembered, called one Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English, again, as a

nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike

artisans,forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and

Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging iron. These persons have learned

better now. The bravery of our free workingpeople was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not

drowned. The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change their weapons and

their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they had

been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute matter into every shape

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new shapes,that we are one people.

It is easy to say that a man is a man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones

and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop, marching with the city elegants,

seems to have been a little startled to find how wonderfully human were the hardhanded men of the Eighth

Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real

manhood of a country is distributed over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own soil

has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty ninth,

to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of Broadway,

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of

religious belief. When the masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his heart that God

takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist" Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a

score of noble young fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the Homoousians are

received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoousians translated from the battlefield to the abodes of

everlasting woe? War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be. He must not

be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle,

and where a man should have but two thoughts: to do his duty, and trust his Maker. Let our brave dead come

back from the fields where they have fallen for law and liberty, and if you will follow them to their graves,

you will find out what the Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its exclusive formulae over

the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen heroes had defended! Very little comparatively do we hear at

such times of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in which all sincere

Christians can agree. It is a noble lesson, and nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and to get at their principles of judgment.

Perhaps most, of us, will agree that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the experience of

the last six months. We had the notable predictions attributed to the Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly

refused to fulfil themselves. We were infested at one time with a set of ominouslooking seers, who shook

their heads and muttered obscurely about some mighty preparations that were making to substitute the rule of

the minority for that of the majority. Organizations were darkly hinted at; some thought our armories would

be seized; and there are not wanting ancient women in the neighboring University town who consider that the

country was saved by the intrepid band of students who stood guard, night after night, over the G. R. cannon

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are those which the sages remember after the event

prophesied of has come to pass, and remind us that they have made long ago. Those who, are rash enough to

predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they hope, or what they fear, or some conclusion from an

abstraction of their own, or some guess founded on private information not half so good as what everybody

gets who reads the papers,never by any possibility a word that we can depend on, simply because there are

cobwebs of contingency between every today and tomorrow that no fieldglass can penetrate when fifty of

them lie woven one over another. Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. Say that you think the

rebels are weaker than is commonly supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger

than is anticipated. Say what you like,only don't be too peremptory and dogmatic; we know that wiser men

than you have been notoriously deceived in their predictions in this very matter.

Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as a prophet, not to put a stop before or

There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that already referred to, which strike us very

forcibly in their relation to the great events passing around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to have

elapsed since this war began. The buds were then swelling which held the leaves that are still green. It seems

as old as Time himself. We cannot fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes of today and

those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into each other like the joints of a pocket telescope.

When the young men from Middlesex dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and

the other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always been the mint in which the world's history has been

coined, and now every day or week or month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that the first impression

bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face hardly seems fresher than the old. All

battlefields are alike in their main features. The young fellows who fell in our earlier struggle seemed like

old men to us until within these few months; now we remember they were like these fiery youth we are

cheering as they go to the fight; it seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was crimsoned but yesterday,

and the cannonball imbedded in the church tower would feel warm, if we laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from earliest time to our own day, where Right and

Wrong have grappled, are but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the field of

conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right against a claim, and, however the struggle of the

hour may go, a movement onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its mighty

ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we think. Our bullets and cannonballs have

lengthened into bolts like those which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons, such as

are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly invented headgear as old as the days of the

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we trust, better. Wiser, for we are

learning our weakness, our narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame.

Better, because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and our people are rising to the

standard the time calls for. For this is the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, if need be,

to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this world, that the generations to follow you may inherit a

whole country whose natural condition shall be peace, and not a broken province which must live under the

perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and all that war brings with it? If we are all ready for

this sacrifice, battles may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are not abruptly asked to give up all that

we most care for, in view of the momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up all,

but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear to us, and should be ready to yield the

rest as it is called for. The time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our means

cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once the marketplace to the voices of those who

proclaim defeat or victory. Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to read and

nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a compromise. At present we have all that nature

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled from its

slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of

battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, opened it, and

Through the neck,no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, foodpipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but

still formidable vessels, a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lampwick, spinal cord, ought to kill at

once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought mortal,which was it? The first; that is better than the

second would be. "Keedysville, a postoffice, Washington Co., Maryland." Leduc? Leduc? Don't remember

that name. The boy is waiting for his money. A dollar and thirteen cents. Has nobody got thirteen cents?

The boy had another message to carry. It was to the father of LieutenantColonel Wilder Dwight, informing

him that his son was grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a town a few

miles this side of Keedysville. This I learned the next morning from the civil and attentive officials at the

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the quarter past two o'clock train, taking with

him Dr. George H. Gay, an accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or pressing

emergency. I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the cars. I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having

companions whose society would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, and whose

It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished apart, that I mean to give my "Atlantic"

readers an account. They must let me tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little matters that

interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely class of elderly persons, who sit at their firesides and

never travel, will, I hope, follow with a kind of interest. For, besides the main object of my excursion, I could

not help being excited by the incidental sights and occurrences of a trip which to a commercial traveller or a

newspaperreporter would seem quite commonplace and undeserving of record. There are periods in which

all places and people seem to be in a conspiracy to impress us with their individuality, in which every

ordinary locality seems to assume a special significance and to claim a particular notice, in which every

person we meet is either an old acquaintance or a character; days in which the strangest coincidences are

continually happening, so that they get to be the rule, and not the exception. Some might naturally think that

anxiety and the weariness of a prolonged search after a near relative would have prevented my taking any

interest in or paying any regard to the little matters around me. Perhaps it had just the contrary effect, and

acted like a diffused stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wideawake in pursuit of a single

object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree

in respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of

Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his

Be that as it may,though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though many times my blood chilled with

what were perhaps needless and unwise fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about

them, which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young fellows to leave his sweetheart

and go into a Peninsular campaign, though I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was

thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and

the mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car windows with an eye for all that passed, that

I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons act from the

ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative friend is the greatest nuisance to have at

one's side during a railroad journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself agreeable. "A

fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be

magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of

new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in

Chladni's famous experiment,fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of

corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the

thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,many

times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication,

some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened

a conversation which has broken my daydream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my

fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibusteam of everyday associations, fatigued my hearing and

attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should

have been filling themselves full of fresh juices. My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations,

which I take to be the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in what we know

as seasickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid

movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a righthand

window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not

only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if they were

moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an

My companions proposed to stay at one of the bestknown and longest established of the NewYork

caravansaries, and I accompanied them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The

traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the

reflection that he has found "his warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of the

great city hotels. The unheralded guest who is honored by mere indifference may think himself blessed with

singular goodfortune. If the despot of the PatentAnnunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his manner,

let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the

door of a bishop's palace, the most icy reception that a country cousin ever received at the city mansion of a

mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the

more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his

dog'seared register. I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this

particular trip I met with more than one exception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I suppose, as a

matter of course. One cannot expect an office clerk to embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a

carpetbag, or a telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he receives for

transmission. Still, humanity is not always totally extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in a

telegraph office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and as

graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with sliding panels and fixed windows, so

that in summer the whole side of the car maybe made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a

traveller, a doubleheaded suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud

of a battlefield. Peachtrees are common, and champagneorchards. Canalboats, drawn by mules, swim

by, feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty passion come over me to be the captain

of one,to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened by storms,to float where I could not

sink,to navigate where there is no shipwreck,to lie languidly on the deck and govern the huge craft by a

word or the movement of a finger: there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has not

The boys cry the "N'York Heddle," instead of "Herald "; I remember that years ago in Philadelphia; we must

be getting near the farther end of the dumbbell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the

waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river. Her physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as

a Frenchman would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the wateredge of the town looking

bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies

at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the walls of a

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be heard of, if anywhere in this region.

His lieutenantcolonel was there, gravely wounded; his collegefriend and comrade in arms, a son of the

house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever.

A fourth bed was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though inquiries

had been made in the towns from and through which the father had brought his two sons and the

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noontrain for Baltimore. Our company was gaining in number

as it moved onwards. We had found upon the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the wife of one of

our most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave Colonel of the __th Regiment, going to seek her wounded

husband at Middletown, a place lying directly in our track. She was the light of our party while we were

On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party Dr. William Hunt of Philadelphia, who

had most kindly and faithfully attended the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at Ball's

Bluff, which came very near being mortal. He was going upon an errand of mercy to the wounded, and found

he had in his memorandumbook the name of our lady's husband, the Colonel, who had been commended to

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry keeping guard over a short railroad bridge. It

was the first evidence that we were approaching the perilous borders, the marches where the North and the

South mingle their angry hosts, where the extremes of our socalled civilization meet in conflict, and the

fierce slavedriver of the Lower Mississippi stares into the stern eyes of the forestfeller from the banks of

the Aroostook. All the way along, the bridges were guarded more or less strongly. In a vast country like ours,

communications play a far more complex part than in Europe, where the whole territory available for

strategic purposes is so comparatively limited. Belgium, for instance, has long been the bowlingalley where

kings roll cannonballs at each other's armies; but here we are playing the game of live ninepins without any

We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, as we were too late for the train to Frederick. At the Eutaw

House, where we found both comfort and courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled the evening

hours for us in the most agreeable manner. We devoted some time to procuring surgical and other articles,

such as might be useful to our friends, or to others, if our friends should not need them. In the morning, I

found myself seated at the breakfasttable next to General Wool. It did not surprise me to find the General

very far from expansive. With Fort McHenry on his shoulders and Baltimore in his breechespocket, and the

weight of a military department loading down his social safetyvalves, I thought it a great deal for an officer

in his trying position to select so very obliging and affable an aid as the gentleman who relieved him of the

We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Frederick. As we stood waiting on the platform, a telegraphic

message was handed in silence to my companion. Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was hastening to

see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. It was no time for empty words of consolation: I knew

what he had lost, and that now was not the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, felt as women

Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me as the friend of a beloved relative of my own, who was

with him during a severe illness in Switzerland; and for whom while living, and for whose memory when

dead, he retained the warmest affection. Since that the story of his noble deeds of daring, of his capture and

escape, and a brief visit home before he was able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name familiar to many

among us, myself among the number. His memory has been honored by those who had the largest

opportunity of knowing his rare promise, as a man of talents and energy of nature. His abounding vitality

must have produced its impression on all who met him; there was a still fire about him which any one could

see would blaze up to melt all difficulties and recast obstacles into implements in the mould of an heroic will.

These elements of his character many had the chance of knowing; but I shall always associate him with the

memory of that pure and noble friendship which made me feel that I knew him before I looked upon his face,

and added a personal tenderness to the sense of loss which I share with the whole community.

Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the companions with whom I set out on my journey.

In one of the cars, at the same station, we met General Shriver of Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose

name is synonymous with a hearty welcome to all whom he can aid by his counsel and his hospitality. He

took great pains to give us all the information we needed, and expressed the hope, which was afterwards

fulfilled, to the great gratification of some of us, that we should meet again when he should return to his

There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip to Frederick, except our passing a squad of Rebel

prisoners, whom I missed seeing, as they flashed by, but who were said to be a most forlornlooking crowd

of scarecrows. Arrived at the Monocacy River, about three miles this side of Frederick, we came to a halt, for

the railroad bridge had been blown up by the Rebels, and its iron pillars and arches were lying in the bed of

the river. The unfortunate wretch who fired the train was killed by the explosion, and lay buried hard by, his

hands sticking out of the shallow grave into which he had been huddled. This was the story they told us, but

whether true or not I must leave to the correspondents of "Notes and Queries " to settle.

There was a great confusion of carriages and wagons at the stopping place of the train, so that it was a long

time before I could get anything that would carry us. At last I was lucky enough to light on a sturdy wagon,

drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and driven by James Grayden, with whom I was destined to have a

somewhat continued acquaintance. We took up a little girl who had been in Baltimore during the late Rebel

inroad. It made me think of the time when my own mother, at that time six years old, was hurried off from

Boston, then occupied by the British soldiers, to Newburyport, and heard the people saying that "the redcoats

were coming, killing and murdering everybody as they went along." Frederick looked cheerful for a place

that had so recently been in an enemy's hands. Here and there a house or shop was shut up, but the national

colors were waving in all directions, and the general aspect was peaceful and contented. I saw no

bulletmarks or other sign of the fighting which had gone on in the streets. The Colonel's lady was taken in

charge by a daughter of that hospitable family to which we had been commended by its head, and I proceeded

At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, I heard mention of an officer in an upper chamber, and,

going there, found Lieutenant Abbott, of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with what looked

like typhoid fever. While there, who should come in but the almost ubiquitous Lieutenant Wilkins, of the

same Twentieth, whom I had met repeatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and who was just from

the battleground. He was going to Boston in charge of the body of the lamented Dr. Revere, the Assistant

Surgeon of the regiment, killed on the field. From his lips I learned something of the mishaps of the regiment.

My Captain's wound he spoke of as less grave than at first thought; but he mentioned incidentally having

heard a story recently that he was killed,a fiction, doubtless,a mistake,a palpable absurdity,not to

be remembered or made any account of. Oh no! but what dull ache is this in that obscurely sensitive region,

somewhere below the heart, where the nervous centre called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself

until a great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the non conductors which isolate it from

ordinary impressions? I talked awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who lay prostrate, feeble, but soldierlike and

uncomplaining, carefully waited upon by a most excellent lady, a captain's wife, New England born, loyal as

the Liberty on a golden tendollar piece, and of lofty bearing enough to have sat for that goddess's portrait.

She had stayed in Frederick through the Rebel inroad, and kept the starspangled banner where it would be

safe, to unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off from the pavement of the town.

Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentleman, occupying a small chamber, and filling it with his

troubles. When he gets well and plump, I know he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help smiling in

the midst of my sympathy for him. He had been a well favored man, he said, sweeping his hand in a

semicircle, which implied that his acuteangled countenance had once filled the goodly curve he described.

He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look upon. Weakness had made him querulous, as it does all of us, and

he piped his grievances to me in a thin voice, with that finish of detail which chronic invalidism alone can

command. He was starving,he could not get what he wanted to eat. He was in need of stimulants, and he

held up a pitiful twoounce phial containing three thimblefulsof brandy,his whole stock of that

encouraging article. Him I consoled to the best of my ability, and afterwards, in some slight measure,

supplied his wants. Feed this poor gentleman up, as these good people soon will, and I should not know him,

nor he himself. We are all egotists in sickness and debility. An animal has been defined as "a stomach

ministered to by organs;" and the greatest man comes very near this simple formula after a month or two of

James Grayden and his team pleased me well enough, and so I made a bargain with him to take us, the lady

and myself, on our further journey as far as Middletown. As we were about starting from the front of the

United States Hotel, two gentlemen presented themselves and expressed a wish to be allowed to share our

conveyance. I looked at them and convinced myself that they were neither Rebels in disguise, nor deserters,

nor campfollowers, nor miscreants, but plain, honest men on a proper errand. The first of them I will pass

over briefly. He was a young man of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment, which

he was going to rejoin. He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had the misfortune to know little

more than what I had learned from Southey's "Life of Wesley." and from the exquisite hymns we have

borrowed from its rhapsodists. The other stranger was a New Englander of respectable appearance, with a

grave, hard, honest, haybearded face, who had come to serve the sick and wounded on the battlefield and

in its immediate neighborhood. There is no reason why I should not mention his name, but I shall content

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James Grayden their driver, the gentle lady,

whose serene patience bore up through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist, and

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the trail from the great battlefield. The

road was filled with straggling and wounded soldiers. All who could travel on foot, multitudes with slight

wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face, were told to take up their beds,alight burden or none at

all, and walk. Just as the battlefield sucks everything into its red vortex for the conflict, so does it drive

everything off in long, diverging rays after the fierce centripetal forces have met and neutralized each other.

For more than a week there had been sharp fighting all along this road. Through the streets of Frederick,

through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt the

windings of the Antietam, the long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their path

through our fields and villages. The slain of higher condition, "embalmed" and ironcased, were sliding off

on the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and committed hastily

to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to

the neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as I have said, at every step in the

road. It was a pitiable sight, truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many single

sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more than the sight of this great caravan of

maimed pilgrims. The companionship of so many seemed to make a jointstock of their suffering; it was next

to impossible to individualize it, and so bring it home, as one can do with a single broken limb or aching

wound. Then they were all of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime of their strength. Though they

tramped so wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing in store for them. These wounds they bore

would be the medals they would show their children and grandchildren by and by. Who would not rather

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and sympathy. Delicate boys, with more spirit than

strength, flushed with fever or pale with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary limbs

along as if each step would exhaust their slender store o� strength. At the roadside sat or lay others, quite

spent with their journey. Here and there was a house at which the wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear

often vain, of getting refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool spring, where the little bands of the long

procession halted for a few moments, as the trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains. My

companions had brought a few peaches along with them, which the Philanthropist bestowed upon the tired

and thirsty soldiers with a satisfaction which we all shared. I had with me a small flask of strong waters, to be

used as a medicine in case of inward grief. From this, also, he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor

fellow who looked as if he needed it. I rather admired the simplicity with which he applied my limited means

of solace to the firstcomer who wanted it more than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on

ceremony, and had I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I should not have reproached my

friend the Philanthropist, any more than I grudged my other ardent friend the two dollars and more which it

It was a lovely country through which we were riding. The hillsides rolled away into the distance, slanting up

fair and broad to the sun, as one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at Lanesborough, for

instance, or in the manyhued mountain chalice at the bottom of which the Shaker houses of Lebanon have

shaped themselves like a sediment of cubical crystals. The wheat was all garnered, and the land ploughed for

a new crop. There was Indian corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins warming their yellow carapaces in the

sunshine like so many turtles; only in a single instance did I notice some wretched little miniature specimens

in form and hue not unlike those colossal oranges of our cornfields. The rail fences were somewhat disturbed,

and the cinders of extinguished fires showed the use to which they had been applied. The houses along the

road were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden fences were poorly built of laths or long slats, and

very rarely of trim aspect. The men of this region seemed to ride in the saddle very generally, rather than

drive. They looked sober and stern, less curious and lively than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features

familiar to us in the countenance of the late John Tyler, our accidental President, was frequently met with.

The women were still more distinguishable from our New England pattern. Soft, sallow, succulent, delicately

finished about the mouth and firmly shaped about the chin, darkeyed, fullthroated, they looked as if they

had been grown in a land of olives. There was a little toss in their movement, full of muliebrity. I fancied

there was something more of the duck and less of the chicken about them, as compared with the daughters of

our leaner soil; but these are mere impressions caught from stray glances, and if there is any offence in them,

At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields, unburied, not grateful to gods or men. I saw no

bird of prey, no illomened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place where it had been held.

The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera, the "twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature,

doubtless; but no black wing was spread over these animal ruins, and no call to the banquet pierced through

Full in the middle of the road, caring little for whom or what they met, came long strings of army wagons,

returning empty from the front after supplies. James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they had a little

rather run into a fellow than not. I liked the looks of these equipages and their drivers; they meant business.

Drawn by mules mostly, six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and driver, they

came jogging along the road, turning neither to right nor left,some driven by bearded, solemn white men,

some by careless, saucylooking negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or obsidian. There seemed to

be nothing about them, dead or alive, that was not serviceable. Sometimes a mule would give out on the road;

then he was left where he lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and get up, when the first public

wagon that came along would hitch him on, and restore him to the sphere of duty.

It was evening when we got to Middletown. The gentle lady who had graced our homely conveyance with her

company here left us. She found her husband, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quarters, well cared

for, very weak from the effects of the fearful operation he had been compelled to undergo, but showing calm

courage to endure as he had shown manly energy to act. It was a meeting full of heroism and tenderness, of

which I heard more than there is need to tell. Health to the brave soldier, and peace to the household over

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 "Dominie." 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 art ranging 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

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 breakneck

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

softhanded 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 halfturned 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 roadside, 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

"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 which our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the beneficent task

of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral standard of a peaceful and united people.

On Sunday morning, the twentyfirst, 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 head quarters 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.

A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself. Now, then, for our twicewounded

volunteer, our young centurion whose doublebarred shoulderstraps 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 hold hard. That is about the programme.

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and whitewashed. 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

The Kitzmuller is a beadyeyed, cheerylooking 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, via Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already in the hospitable home

I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was the 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 thirtysix 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 battlefield 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 battlefield. 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,

capboxes, bullets, cartridgeboxes, 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 buryingparty, 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 watercourse, and which

seemed to have been used as a riflepit. 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 battlefield. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one

turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy heeltaps. 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. Cleveland 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 battlefield 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 be 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 lightheartedness 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't know, sir." better than I have sometimes relished the large discourse of

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

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

BurkeandHare 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 multum." 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

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

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 matchbox, a Scotch one, of the Macphersonplaid 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 matchbox, I found it was gone. This was rather awkward,not on account of the loss,

but of the unavoidable fact that one of my fellowlodgers must have taken it. I must try to find out what it

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

twinbrother from the same workshop. In memory of which event, we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric

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 23,

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

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

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires struck me very much, so that I was not

surprised to find "FairView" 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

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 breechespocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind

offices. About the doors of the hotel the newsboys 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

"Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twentythird, 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

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 seamonster, 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

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

This cornerhouse 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

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 wayside, 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 letterwriter, 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

carpetbag, 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, were 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 Ichaboe 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 battlefield had not streamed off so far as this. Evening found us in the cars; they lighted

candles in springcandlesticks; odd enough I thought it in the land of oilwells 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 Frascati. 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, middleaged 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,

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 toddymixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect, as all

grogdispensers 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 bartender, 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

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having slept for I don't know how many nights.

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

I am Dr. SoandSo of Hubtown, looking after my wounded son. (I gave my name and said Boston, of

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features growing cordial. Then he put out his

hand, and goodhumoredly 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 crossquestioning 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

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, whitehaired 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 kindhearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see me as happy as himself. He

went upstairs to his son's chamber, and presently came down to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P________ , of the Pennsylvania __th, was a very fresh, brightlooking young man, lying in bed

from the effects of a recent injury received in action. A grapeshot, 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 barroom 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 be was a Captain, by the two bars on his shoulderstrap. His name was my familyname;

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 rockcrystal.

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 tomorrow morning we will send a message to our friends in Philadelphia, and

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

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 nighttrain from

Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home. There is such a train, not down in the

guidebook, 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 wellknown 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 clew 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 schoolhouses, 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 classtutor, 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

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 singularlooking 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 travelstained vagabonds. They looked slouchy, listless, torpid,an

illconditioned crew, at first sight, made up of such fellows as an old woman would drive away from her

henroost with a broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery army which has given our generals so

much trouble,"Secesh prisoners," as a bystander 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

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 harikari. 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

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

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 wildhaired, unsoaped

boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was. I

[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.]

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed, this dwarfed and etiolated soul,

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,

ironheeled 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

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 redlegged Zouaves, in whose

company he got an ornamental bulletmark 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

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

pavingstone had just splashed into the water, and I nodded a goodby to the boy fighter, thinking how

much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with unanswerable arguments and crushing

statements in his own tent than it would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair

proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him before he had time to say dunder

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message. Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital

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 goodhumored, wearing his

broadbrimmed, steeplecrowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,a sure sign of exuberant

vitality in a mature and dignified person like him, businesslike 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

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an odd young native, neither boy nor

man, "as a codling when 't is almost an apple," who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled

faintly at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion, and a gleam of the shrewdness that all

men get who live in the atmosphere of horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with tents,

which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in huge letters, thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY

BROTHERS, DEVIL'S HOLE, and similar inscriptions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which

looks upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common, and shows a long front of handsome houses with fair

gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile across here, but very shallow now. The codling told us that a Rebel

spy had been caught trying its fords a little while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin with a heavy ball chained

to his leg,a popular story, but a lie, Dr. Wilson said. A little farther along we came to the barkless stump of

the tree to which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named after him, was tied by the Indians for some

unpleasant operation of scalping or roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who paddled across

the stream to save him. Our youngling pointed out a very respectable looking stone house as having been

"built by the Indians" about those times. Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions and dogs and things from his Arctic

"Them?" he answered. "Them's the men that's been out West, out to Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin."

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever it is called, seems most worth notice.

Its facade is imposing, with a row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a crag

over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower floor only appeared to be open to the public. Its tessellated

pavement and ample courts suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel uncrowded at

their devotions; but from appearances about the place where the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked

the officiating priest for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be unanswered.

The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once looked upon, the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at

Padua. It was the same thing in Italy and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and calls it a

place of entertainment. The fragrance of innumerable libations and the smoke of incensebreathing cigars

and pipes shall ascend day and night through the arches of his funereal monument. What are the poor dips

which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that stand at the corners of St. Genevieve's filigreecased

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 tomorrow for Harrisburg Penna Is doing well Mrs HK."

We shall sleep well tonight; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous

accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the overwearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber

like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz,

like that which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the whole

frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild,

pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently confided to me, with

infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should not have thought

me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved

a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers

are supposed to possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of his ideal in this respect, he was pleased to

say that he found me by no means the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had

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

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 townpumps and other striking objects

which we had once inspected, as seen by the different lights of evening and morning. After this, we visited

the schoolhouse 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

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

matchbox worse than the Ravel pantomimist and his snuffbox 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 freighttrain, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was expecting, for a grand

smash up. I shivered at the thought, and asked an employee of the road, with whom I had formed an

acquaintance a few minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train with this which was

just going out. He smiled an official smile, and answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that

Twentyfour 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

Today 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 firstborn, whom I

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

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

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

"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

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 trancelike remoteness, a mystic dreaminess

of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind

reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be behind time, and then a

vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's chambers.

For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost

unnatural. Yet he spoke to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must now be

reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not

that he would have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has died that

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

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough. The Captain had gone to

Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I took

it for granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some ladies saw him across the street,

and seeing, were moved with pity, and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their

invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks

should be; the ladies were some of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares, and

unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and musicsprinklings 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 loghouse, and the

rickety milkcart! 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 goodhumored at times, that, if

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of that great city, which has endeared

itself so much of late to all the country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by its

sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our economic civilization. It provides for the

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

perhaps than any other city anywhere. Many of its characteristics are accounted for to some extent by its

geographical position. It is the great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the South

and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits, and result in a compound which neither turns

litmus red nor turmeric brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out Franklin and

Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its famous waterworks. 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

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 "operahouse" was spacious and admirably ventilated. As I

was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and

through an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange

intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces. I called the attention of one of my

neighbors to it, but "Bones" was irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing

luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncaredfor 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

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people whom I met in the cars, and had

been in contact with them at some time or other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a

group by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman

who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at

New Haven. The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in the world, who keep going round

and round behind the scenes and then before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stageshow. Suppose that I

should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries,

where should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some

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

groundfloor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really

very full. Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,to reach the neighborhood of which last the per

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

The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however. It is a giant corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork,

which, by some divine judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending and

descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls,

called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels that it is his property,at least, as

much as it is anybody's. My Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards. I went,

therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new

pleasuregrounds 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 pleasureground and our

Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between

its artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond. I say this not invidiously, but in justice to

the beauties which surround our own metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the

great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would

be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer

clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a diamond on her left

On Monday morning, the twentyninth of September, we took the cars for home. Vacant lots, with Irish and

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

NORWALK. Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of the great disaster. But that my

lids were heavy on that morning, my readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my

friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them hanging over the abyss. From

Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.

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

dare must be the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,with its neat carriages, metropolitan

hotels, precious old college dormitories, its vistas of elms and its dishevelled weepingwillows; Hartford,

substantial, wellbridged, manysteepled city,every conical spire an extinguisher of some

nineteenthcentury 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

widemeadowed, wellfeeding, horseloving, hotsummered, gianttreed town,city among villages,

village among cities; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of crossing railroadbars, where the snorting

Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled in their dens; Framingham, fair cupbearer,

leafcinctured Hebe of the deepbosomed Queen sitting by the seaside on the throne of the Six Nations. And

now I begin to know the road, not by towns, but by single dwellings; not by miles, but by rods. The poles of

the great magnet that draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must be near at

hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall

granite obelisk comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled 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 threepilled city, with its domecrowned summit, reveals itself, as when manybreasted

Fling open the windowblinds 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 thickset 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

[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the 4th of July, 1863.]

It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's birth, to recall whatever is happiest and noblest

in our past history, and to join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the heroes, the men of thought and

the men of action, to whom that history owes its existence. In other years this pleasing office may have been

all that was required of the holiday speaker. But today, when the very life of the nation is threatened, when

clouds are thick about us, and men's hearts are throbbing with passion, or failing with fear, it is the living

question of the hour, and not the dead story of the past, which forces itself into all minds, and will find

In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who sincerely love their country and mean to do their

duty to her disappoint the hopes and expectations of those who are actively working in her cause. They seem

to have lost whatever moral force they may have once possessed, and to go drifting about from one profitless

discontent to another, at a time when every citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service. It is because

their minds are bewildered, and they are no longer truly themselves. Show them the path of duty, inspire them

with hope for the future, lead them upwards from the turbid stream of events to the bright, translucent springs

of eternal principles, strengthen their trust in humanity and their faith in God, and you may yet restore them

At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should

try to judge the weak and wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously. The conditions in which our

vast community of peaceloving citizens find themselves are new and unprovided for. Our quiet burghers

and farmers are in the position of riverboats blown from their moorings out upon a vast ocean, where such a

typhoon is raging as no mariner who sails its waters ever before looked upon. If their beliefs change with the

veering of the blast, if their trust in their fellow men, and in the course of Divine Providence, seems

wellnigh shipwrecked, we must remember that they were taken unawares, and without the preparation

which could fit them to struggle with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith is the man; and

they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to those who for want of it are faint at heart,

Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,that self government is the natural condition of an

adult society, as distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary arrangements of monarchy

and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences; that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give

every child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the best of itself that laws can give it;

that Liberty, the one of the two claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves and divided

between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union; that the contest in which we are engaged is one of

principles overlaid by circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we study the movements of

events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral nature of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in

the study; that all honest persons with average natural sensibility, with respectable understanding, educated in

the school of northern teaching, will have eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed host which

fights or pleads for freedom, as against every form of tyranny; if not in the front rank now, then in the rear

rank by and by;assuming these propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are ready to do, and believing

that the more they are debated before the public the more they will gain converts, we owe it to the timid and

the doubting to keep the great questions of the time in unceasing and untiring agitation. They must be

discussed, in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by different classes of thinkers; by priests and

laymen; by statesmen and simple voters; by moralists and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated

handlaborers; by men of facts and figures, and by men of theories and aspirations; in the abstract and in the

concrete; discussed and rediscussed every month, every week, every day, and almost every hour, as the

telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky base of our political order.

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions of the great body of loyal citizens. They

may do nothing toward changing the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who follow

politics as a trade. They may have no hold upon that class of persons who are defective in moral sensibility,

just as other persons are wanting in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds, the tender

consciences supported by the tremulous knees of an infirm intelligence, the timid compromisers who are

always trying to curve the straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual debate of

these living questions is the one offered means of grace and hope of earthly redemption. And thus a true,

unhesitating patriot may be willing to listen with patience to arguments which he does not need, to appeals

which have no special significance for him, in the hope that some less clear in mind or less courageous in

As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth day of July, 1863, at the beginning of

the Eightyeighth Year of American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge

in public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental one, which might have been avoided

but for our fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are madly

persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if

our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to an irresponsible tyranny; if we

are moving in the narrow circles which are to ingulf us in national ruin,then we had better sing a dirge, and

leave this idle assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are reverberating through the air, and tear down

the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that should cover the

land; there should be silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets; and the emblems with which

we tell our nation's story and prefigure its future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result of long incubating causes; inevitable as

the cataclysms that swept away the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy end,

but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not

hopeless, but only growing to such dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right

throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but a peace proclaimed from the capital of

every revolted province in the name of the sacred, inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm,

conjured up by the imagination of the weak, acted on by the craft of the cunning; if so far from circling

inward to the gulf of our perdition, the movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution carries us

farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed

from the outermost coil of the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make them seem

true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's discourse, then we may join without madness in the

day's exultant festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the

air, and the children who are to inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come a little sooner, or a little later, but it

must have come. The disease of the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery of war

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse into a forlorn belief that if this or that

man had never lived, or if this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have gone on in

peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the glories of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never

proclaimed his heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr. Phillips, the Cassandra in

masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones

of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the senatechamber to smooth the billows of contention; if the Olympian

brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of

rebellion,we might have been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but simple Martha's faith,

without the reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling, who believe that they depend for

existence on a few swimmers who ride their waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to

continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own bubbles. If this is true of all the

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

intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in the more limited ranges referred to, no

fact is more familiar than that there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once, so

that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star. You may trace a common motive and force in

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

sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following centuries, growing out of the

soil with stem and bud and blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the flaming

aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven. You may see the same law showing itself in the brief periods of

glory which make the names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in the painters, the

sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first

part of this century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of Cowper and the song of

Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached

the same reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived independently of each

other at the great law of the diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams

felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus,

in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and

Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. You see why Patrick Henry, in

Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were startling the crown officials with the same accents of liberty,

and why the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the Province of Massachusetts. This

law of simultaneous intellectual movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay

and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable to that change of thought and

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this or that enthusiast or fanatic. It was

the consequence of a movement in mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions, and the

men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it most completely, or who talked longest

and loudest about it. Long before the accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the

halls of the Capitol, long before the "Liberator" opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself out

by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional

divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson

foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a

quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocqueville

recognized with that penetrating insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the

Union was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but through the change of character it was

bringing about in the people of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half

a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the system, adding the solemn warning,

now fearfully justifying itself in the sight of his descendants, that "by an inevitable chain of causes and

effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." The Virginian romancer pictured the

faroff scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of

Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain should rise on the

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned us of the calamities in store for

our nation, never doubted what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The

descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny," the "petty tyrants" as their own leading statesmen called

them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated.

It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the

sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,so have their natures become changed by long breathing

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden harvest of crime. Violence stalked into the

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

conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief stronghold of the Union. That the

principle which underlay these acts of fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed

sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government to be its Messiah to the listening world.

As with Pharaoh, the Lord hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened that of the

unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. Then spake Mr. "VicePresident" Stephens those memorable

words which fixed forever the theory of the new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism to the

dignity of a philosophic system. He first proclaimed the gospel of eternal tyranny as the new revelation which

Providence had reserved for the western Palestine. Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! The cornerstone

of the newborn dispensation is the recognized inequality of races; not that the strong may protect the weak,

as men protect women and children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and of God to buy,

to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with

hereditary curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon whose darkness has

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave States, we read in the "Richmond

Examiner": "The establishment of the Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course of the

mistaken civilization of the age. For 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery,

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to look for any other cause than slavery as

having any material agency in dividing the country. Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you will

find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting

its splintery projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to the limitations of

particular States, but as a county or other limited section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. Add to

this the official statement made in 1862, that "there is not one regiment or battalion, or even company of men,

which was organized in or derived from the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union"; throw in

gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit declaration in the speech referred to, and we will consider the evidence

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of fracture, this precise statement, testimony from

so many sources, extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of slavery, a priori, and its

actual influence as shown by the facts, few will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed

its course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on the white subjects of its corrupting

dominion. Northern acquiescence or even sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily on

the consciences of its supporters. Many profess to think that Northern fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a

mordant in fixing the black dye of slavery in regions which would but for that have washed themselves free

of its stain in tears of penitence. It is a delusion and a snare to trust in any such false and flimsy reasons

where there is enough and more than enough in the institution itself to account for its growth. Slavery

gratifies at once the love of power, the love of money, and the love of ease; it finds a victim for anger who

cannot smite back his oppressor; and it offers to all, without measure, the seductive privileges which the

Mormon gospel reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible of Mahomet only dares promise to the

Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that the same gallowstree ought to bear as

its fruit the archtraitor and the leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not

satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross also for the reforming Galilean, who interfered so

rudely with its conservative traditions! It is asserted that the fault was quite as much on our side as on the

other; that our agitators and abolishers kindled the flame for which the combustibles were all ready on the

other side of the border. If these men could have been silenced, our brothers had not died.

Who are the persons that use this argument? They are the very ones who are at the present moment most

zealous in maintaining the right of free discussion. At a time when every power the nation can summon is

needed to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their force upon its foes,when a false traitor at

home may lose us a battle by a word, and a lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or weekly

stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay

license, to deal with government, with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any terms they

choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and assail the only men who have any claim at all to

rule over the country, as the very ones who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposition members of

society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault with those persons who spoke their minds freely in

the past on that great question which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards reformers. They are never general

favorites. They are apt to interfere with vested rights and timehallowed interests. They often wear an

unlovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to that of Nature's sanitary commission for the removal

of material nuisances. It is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty. It is not the bird

of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted

the sacred duty of eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious analogy teaches us

not to expect all the qualities which please the general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the

moral nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they please us in all their aspects or

not, is not the question. Like them or not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.

They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are alive, at any rate, and it is

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

because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less

vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of

courtyard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies

open like the seedcapsule of a snapweed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring

up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St.

Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of Missouri, chairman

of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of

Slavery! They hunted another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within a few weeks a

regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the marks of the slave driver's whip on their backs,

marched out before a vast multitude tremulous with newlystirred sympathies, through the streets of the same

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at their door, are apt to be severe also on

what they contemptuously emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is charitable to

believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly understand the meaning of the words they use, but

rather play with them, as certain socalled "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed characters set before

them. In all questions involving duty, we act from sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order

rests upon them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any two of its members

implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment. It is true that men often forget them or act against their

bidding in the keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left the hard intellect of man to

work out its devices without the constant presence of beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of

woman is the everrocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or later steal their way

into the mind of her sterner companion; which will by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers,

and at last thunder forth in the edicts of its lawgivers and masters. Woman herself borrows half her

tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that

shudders at the picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our home." To quarrel, then,

with the class of minds that instinctively attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the

sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is merely a display of unthinking levity, or

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one direction, and the awakened conscience

of the North stirring in the other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally inevitable its

appearance in the field of national politics. For what is meant by selfgovernment is, that a man shall make

his convictions of what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his fractional share of the

government extends. If one has come to the conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or

statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected that he will choose to be represented by

those who share his belief, and who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get rid of the

wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents involved. To prevent opinion from organizing

itself under political forms may be very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice of

selfgovernment. And if at last organized opinions become arrayed in hostile shape against each other, we

shall find that a just war is only the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected impulses of which the

original source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong,

which, after passing through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of material force. Behind

the bayonet is the lawgiver's statute, behind the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the

tender conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,who looks upon the face of God himself

reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained

The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the order of Nature and the Being who established

it. Unless the law of moral progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it would

be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience against a system, the legislation relating to

which, in the words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents "such

unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted." Until the infinite

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

virtues, that system was hissed at by all the oldworld civilization. While in one section of our land the

attempt has been going on to lift it out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the sphere of the world's

beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the protest of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow

louder and stronger until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces. The moral uprising of the

North came with the logical precision of destiny; the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to

erect a slave empire followed with fated certainty; and the only question left for us of the North was, whether

we should suffer the cause of the Nation to go by default, or maintain its existence by the argument of cannon

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy purpose. It was primarily, and is to

this moment, for the preservation of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a civil

request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation would commit suicide, without making any

unnecessary trouble about it. It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that there were

constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying violent hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a

somewhat peremptory tone, that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from food until the natural

consequences of that proceeding should manifest themselves. All this was done as between a single State and

an isolated fortress; but it was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast conspiracy

uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring

as soon as the doors were opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle their wild natures to

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated beforehand by the conspirators, to make

sure that no absence of malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into the

trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively,

to "fire the southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling hand of an old

whiteheaded man, the wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the

templeburner of ancient Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal

American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image, the person it

represented suffered all that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking

fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the representative. Robbery could go no farther,

for every loyal man of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid hands upon

him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those

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

future,the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the

dearest object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of events if under the influence of

fear, or of what some would name humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please

themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under any or all these influences we had taken

the insult and the violence of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat, in

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida would have challenged as her own

the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have

anchored under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at their

peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson

Davis shaped for her figurehead at Norfolk,for Andrew Jackson was a hater of secession, and his was no

fitting effigy for the battleship of the redhanded conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the

ships and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the traitors' hands, what chance would

the loyal men in the Border States have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now triumphant

faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee,saved, or looking to be saved, even as it

is, as by fire,have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the Capital, the archives, the glory, the

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

volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are

we permitted to doubt that in the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not sleeping,

which only listened for the first word that made it safe to strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and

blend its golden scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cottonfields. Who would not wish that

he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels

were to be found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own streets, against their own

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to

provoke every further wrong, and to furnish the means for its commission. It would have been to placard

ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud laborthieves called us. It would

have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands of alien

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and to humanity. You have only to see

who are our friends and who are our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating.

We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us. We know what the West End of London wishes

may be result of this controversy. The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears, threatening

as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they

would exult if they could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless weapon! The man

who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in

March, 1862: "That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a

monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master

it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way possible to verify its

prejudgment, will probably be the verdict made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the Court of St. James, in the midst of

embarrassments perhaps not less than those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the

"It cannot be denied,"says another observer, placed on one of our national watchtowers in a foreign

capital,"it cannot be denied that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places, is

more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds, "everywhere sympathize with us, for they

know that our cause is that of free institutions,that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy."

These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage

paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our

fellowcitizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,John

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of British institutions, that such men

should have to speak in such terms of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt,

very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a strife which, whatever pretexts were

alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one side the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in

earnest, and on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her own poet, one of the truest and purest of

her children, had said of his countrymen, in words which might well have been spoken by the British Premier

to the American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind feeling on the part of his government:

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest lines. We have found out, too, who our

European enemies are, and why they are our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, which,

in spite of the timehallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs so long associated with its history, is still

venerated as the throne. One of these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the purchased army; the

third is the long suffering people. Whenever the third caryatid comes to life and walks from beneath its

burden, the capitals of Europe will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder that our

ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic split into two antagonistic forces,

each paralyzing the other, and standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be

pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that broken chalice which held the

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know our friends, and they are the

foremost champions of political and social progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have

both been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has been true to the cause of the people.

That deep and generous thinker, who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher

thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which none but her sordid hucksters and

her selfish landgraspers can refuse to listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from

liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations embodied themselves for us in the

person of the youthful Lafayette. Italy,would you know on which side the rights of the people and the

hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what surer test, what ampler demonstration

can you askthan the eager sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling many, and

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is granted that it is for no base end, but first

for the life of the nation, and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind, for

knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth

which neither the unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be that the strife is

hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it too much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for

the North depends chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and manhood enough

to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can

never be told until they are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of these qualities

are not commonly themselves patterns of either. We have a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave

enough not to give up a just and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown to be unattainable for

want of material agencies. What was the end to be attained by accepting the gage of battle? It was to get the

better of our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps which we should then consider

necessary to our present and future safety. The more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must it be

subdued. It may not even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long since, that the victory over the

rebellion should have been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to develop the true meaning of the

conflict, to bring out the full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the means which would have

served it for a still more desperate future effort. We cannot complain that our task has proved too easy. We

give our Southern army,for we must remember that it is our army, after all, only in a state of mutiny,we

give our Southern army credit for excellent spirit and perseverance in the face of many disadvantages. But we

have a few plain facts which show the probable course of events; the gradual but sure operation of the

blockade; the steady pushing back of the boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even

of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting with their long lines of bayonets,may

God grant them victory!the progress of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold and

currency at Richmond and Washington. If the indexhands of force and credit continue to move in the ratio

of the past two years, where will the Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of the two sections of the country signify

nothing, or the resources of our opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own.

The running sand of the hourglass gives no warning, but runs as freely as ever when its last grains are about

to fall. The merchant wears as bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at the height

of his fortunes. If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy "a mere shell," so far as his equestrian excursion

carried him, how can we say how soon the shell will collapse? It seems impossible that our own dissensions

can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the Morristown revolt, which Washington put down

at once by the aid of his faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is ruin, and the

violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure on every inch of the containing surface. Now we

know the tremendous force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern people. There are men in

the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence which reaches us, who have been recruited with

packs of bloodhounds, and drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what is the

bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the remorseless conspirators; and from that we

can judge of the elements of destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of the fabric

of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason from the laws of human nature as to what

must be the feelings of the people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible that the love of

the life which they have had in common, their glorious recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies

as Americans, their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and protected by it the world

over, their worship of the same God, under the same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same

ecclesiastical organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and eternal alienation. Men

do not change in this way, and we may be quite sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day

or other prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the plotters have managed with such

consummate skill. It is hardly to be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in Charleston,

in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our

good friends, the enemies," as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the prisoncells of Paul

and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they

few; there is material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it, to overrun and by degrees to

recolonize the South, and it is far from impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of

its new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan which Nature follows when she

would fill a halffinished tissue with bloodvessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say absolutely hopeless,because that is

the unfounded hypothesis of those whose wish is father to their thought,but full of discouragement. Can

we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands? As honor comes before safety, let us look at

that first. We have undertaken to resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and aggressions,

even to the direct menace of our national capital. The blood which our best and bravest have shed will never

sink into the ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is shown to be insufficient. If we

stop now, all the loss of life has been butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the

outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of honor blooms forever where it was shed.

To accept less than indemnity for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can afford it,

and security for the future, would discredit us in our own eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to

be able to despise us. But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the surrender of our

fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of the national river,and this and much

more would surely be demanded of us,would place the United Fraction of America on a level with the

Peruvian guanoislands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would be safe and lasting? We could

have an armistice, no doubt, long enough for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to

knit together. But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace, in which the grass would have time to

grow in the warpaths, and the bruised arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State arsenal,

sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many sucking lambs? It is not the question whether the

same set of soldiers would be again summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we have seen

enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented with militia musters and

shamfights. The question is whether we could leave our children and our children's children with any secure

trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are enduring, probably on a more extended

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is established on the basis of Southern

independence, the only peace possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who already

call the Southern whites their masters. We know what the prevailingwe do not mean universalspirit and

temper of those people have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and bitter warfare.

We know what their tone is to the people of the North; if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are

schoolmasters who will teach us to our heart's content. We see how easily their social organization adapts

itself to a state of warfare. They breed a superior order of men for leaders, an ignorant commonalty ready to

follow them as the vassals of feudal times followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen, who, unless this war

changes them from chattels to human beings, will continue to add vastly to their military strength in raising

their food, in building their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in fact, except, it may be, the

handling of weapons. The institution proclaimed as the cornerstone of their government does violence not

merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as

sincere as any tribe of the desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah. They call themselves

by the same name as the Christians of the North, yet there is as much difference between their Christianity

and that of Wesley or of Channing, as between creeds that in past times have vowed mutual extermination.

Still we must not call them barbarians because they cherish an institution hostile to civilization. Their highest

culture stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark background of ignorance against which it is seen; but

it would be injustice to deny that they have always shone in political science, or that their military capacity

makes them most formidable antagonists, and that, however inferior they may be to their Northern

fellowcountrymen in most branches of literature and science, the social elegances and personal graces lend

Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,our neighbors along a splintered line of

fracture extending for thousands of miles,but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce, intolerant,

fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual standing army; hating us worse than the Southern

Hamilcar taught his swarthy boy to hate the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile nation on our

frontier is incompatible with our peaceful development? Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced labor,

multiplied by the breaking up of new cottonfields, and in due time by the reopening of the slavetrade, will

go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses, to fit out navies. The old Saracens, fanatics for a religion which

professed to grow by conquest, were a nation of predatory and migrating warriors. The Southern people,

fanatics for a system essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which cannot remain stationary, but must

grow by alternate appropriations of labor and of land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes. Already,

even, the insolence of their language to the people of the North is a close imitation of the style which those

proud and arrogant Asiatics affected toward all the nations of Europe. What the "Christian dogs" were to the

followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the "Northern mudsills" are to the followers of the Southern

Moloch. The accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were prefigured in the court of the

chivalric Saladin, and the long train of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent. In all

branches of culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond them. The schools of mediaeval learning

were filled with Arabian teachers. The heavens declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers, as Algorab and

Aldebaran repeat their Arabic names to the students of the starry firmament. The sumptuous edifice erected

by the Art of the nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Industry, could show nothing fairer than the

court which copies the Moorish palace that crowns the summit of Granada. Yet this was the power which

Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had to break like a potter's vessel; these were

the people whom Spain had to utterly extirpate from the land where they had ruled for centuries

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous Afrit of Southern nationality, for a power on

your borders that will be to you what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shattered their

armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their broken strength upon the refuse heap of extinguished

barbarisms. Prepare for the possible fate of Christian Spain; for a slavemarket in Philadelphia; for the

Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds consecrated by the domestic virtues of a long line of

Presidents and their exemplary families. Remember the ages of border warfare between England and

Scotland, closed at last by the union of the two kingdoms. Recollect the hunting of the deer on the Cheviot

hills, and all that it led to; then think of the game which the dogs will follow openmouthed across our

Southern border, and all that is like to follow which the child may rue that is unborn; think of these

possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are ready to make a peace which will give you

such a neighbor; which may betray your civilization as that of half the Peninsula was given up to the Moors;

which may leave your fair border provinces to be crushed under the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left to be

No! no! fellowcitizens! We must fight in this quarrel until one side or the other is exhausted. Rather than

suffer all that we have poured out of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance, to have been

expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question, an unfinished conflict, an unavenged insult, an

unrighted wrong, a stained escutcheon, a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an unheroic memory to the

descendants of those who have always claimed that their fathers were heroes; rather than do all this, it were

hardly an American exaggeration to say, better that the last man and the last dollar should be followed by the

There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a mere irresponsible tyranny. If there

are any who really believe that our present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and family,

that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become ABRAHAM, DEI GRATIA REX,they cannot

have duly pondered his letter of June 12th, in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a rustic lover

called upon by an anxious parent to explain his intentions. The force of his argument is not at all injured by

the homeliness of his illustrations. The American people are not much afraid that their liberties will be

usurped. An army of legislators is not very likely to throw away its political privileges, and the idea of a

despotism resting on an open ballotbox, is like that of Bunker Hill Monument built on the waves of Boston

Harbor. We know pretty well how much of sincerity there is in the fears so clamorously expressed, and how

far they are found in company with uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the nation. We have

learned to put a true value on the services of the watchdog who bays the moon, but does not bite the thief!

The men who are so busy holystoning the quarterdeck, while all hands are wanted to keep the ship afloat,

can no doubt show spots upon it that would be very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal man,

however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such as emergencies always give rise to. If any

halfloyal man forgets his code of halfdecencies and halfduties so far as to become obnoxious to the

peremptory justice which takes the place of slower forms in all centres of conflagration, there is no sympathy

for him among the soldiers who are risking their lives for us; perhaps there is even more satisfaction than

when an avowed traitor is caught and punished. For of all men who are loathed by generous natures, such as

fill the ranks of the armies of the Union, none are so thoroughly loathed as the men who contrive to keep just

within the limits of the law, while their whole conduct provokes others to break it; whose patriotism consists

in stopping an inch short of treason, and whose political morality has for its safeguard a just respect for the

jailer and the hangman! The simple preventive against all possible injustice a citizen is like to suffer at the

hands of a government which in its need and haste must of course commit many errors, is to take care to do

nothing that will directly or indirectly help the enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war.

When the clamor against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can claim this negative merit, it

may be listened to. When it comes from those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will

receive the attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which demand righting, but the

pretence of any plan for changing the essential principle of our selfgoverning system is a figment which its

contrivers laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel today

about the strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against the invader? We

are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with the enemy at

work in our own harbors, we begin to understand the difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that

helps and the man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in sight, complains that our anchor is

dragging in his mud, and the man who violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they

jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the whirlpool of national destruction. If

our borders are invaded, it is only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his slumbering

mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for.

We are pouring out the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always the price that

must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we to complain of, whose granaries are choking with

plenty, whose streets are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry is abundant enough

to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty

valleys is an inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of heat and power,

imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet

for unnumbered ages, whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of golden

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and bear for our national salvation what

they have done and borne over and over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with

Napoleon, bear an incometax of ten per cent., and must we faint under the burden of an incometax of three

per cent.? Was she content to negotiate a loan at fiftythree for the hundred, and that paid in depreciated

paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above

par, and the "fivetwenty" war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount of nearly two hundred

millions, without any check to the flow of the current pressing inwards against the doors of the Treasury?

Except in those portions of the country which are the immediate seat of war, or liable to be made so, and

which, having the greatest interest not to become the border states of hostile nations, can best afford to suffer

now, the state of prosperity and comfort is such as to astonish those who visit us from other countries. What

are war taxes to a nation which, as we are assured on good authority, has more men worth a million now than

it had worth ten thousand dollars at the close of the Revolution,whose whole property is a hundred times,

and whose commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred times, what it was then? But we need not study Mr.

Still's pamphlet and "Thompson's BankNote Reporter" to show us what we know well enough, that, so far

from having occasion to tremble in fear of our impending ruin, we must rather blush for our material

prosperity. For the multitudes who are unfortunate enough to be taxed for a million or more, of course we

must feel deeply, at the same time suggesting that the more largely they report their incomes to the

taxgatherer, the more consolation they will find in the feeling that they have served their country. But,let

us say it plainly,it will not hurt our people to be taught that there are other things to be cared for besides

moneymaking and moneyspending; that the time has come when manhood must assert itself by brave

deeds and noble thoughts; when womanhood must assume its most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort," and,

if need be, "to command," those whose services their country calls for. This Northern section of the land has

become a great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the longextended counter. We have grown rich

for what? To put gilt bands on coachmen's hats? To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks which

the toiling artisans of France can send us? To look through plateglass windows, and pity the brown

soldiers,or sneer at the black ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its old

minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in diamonds? to dredge our maidens' hair

with golddust? to float through life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the beaches,

and back again from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for this that the broad domain of the Western

hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by civilization?for this, that Time, the father of empires, unbound

the virgin zone of this youngest of his daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil of her forests, to the

rude embrace of the adventurous Colonist? All this is what we see around us, now, now while we are actually

fighting this great battle, and supporting this great load of indebtedness. Wait till the diamonds go back to the

Jews of Amsterdam; till the plateglass window bears the fatal announcement, For Sale or to Let; till the

till the golddust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy bread; till the fastdriving youth

smokes his claypipe on the platform of the horsecars; till the musicgrinders cease because none will pay

them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twentyfour dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and

pineapples selling at the streetcorners; till the tenflounced dress has but three flounces, and it is felony to

drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of

exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;but till then, let us not be cowards with our

purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary

ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the

influence of the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we are just leaving.

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixtyone, at

halfpast four of the clock in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South Carolina

at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States. Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty

years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation. Its wad was the charter of our national

existence. Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our national sovereignty. As the

echoes of its thunder died away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office of the land. That word

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is claimed by its true parents. This war has

eaten its way backward through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of ordinances

and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of conscience and duty;

until it stands revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of

civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms which the wise Romans, the world's

lawgivers, always recognized as above all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum

acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: "Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere right of

Nature." The old rules which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless "as

moonlight on the dial of the day." We have followed precedents as long as they could guide us; now we must

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the current prices of United States stocks

show that we value our nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth. If we feel that we are paying too

dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall those grand words of Samuel Adams:

"I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it were revealed from heaven that nine hundred

and ninetynine were to perish, and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty!"

What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he said, in repeating his Pater Noster,

fiat voluntas MEA,let my will be done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,because my will is

Thine. We want the virile energy of determination which made the oath of Andrew Jackson sound so like the

devotion of an ardent saint that the recording angel might have entered it unquestioned among the prayers of

War is a grim business. Two years ago our women's fingers were busy making "Havelocks." It seemed to us

then as if the Havelock made half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and

illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we

feel that there is some great and noble principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought we were

fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and what we are fighting against.

We are fighting for our existence. We say to those who would take back their several contributions to that

undivided unity which we call the Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot reclaim

the brass you flung into the crucible! There are rights, possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties,

acquired, retained, called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute solidarity,belonging to the

United States as an organic whole, which cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim

as its own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of rebellion tear it limb from limb, and

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence reposes, now subjected by those who

fired the scroll on which it was written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the

necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause of all the progeny of lesser

antagonisms. Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the

system that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence

trembled to anticipate. And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy

Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of

Christ from the hands of infidels. The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burialplace

more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies

buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the rights

which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we must fight it against that great General who

will bring to it all the powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down from

heaven. He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him; he has bribed many a smoothtongued

preacher to be his chaplain; he has engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the profligate

by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler natures by motives which we can all understand; whose

delusion we pity as we ought always to pity the error of those who know not what they do. Against him or for

him we are all called upon to declare ourselves. There is no neutrality for any single trueborn American. If

any seek such a position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse points them to their place in the antechamber

We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve him against the enemies of civilization.

We must make and keep the great river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the forefoot of the wild,

untamable rebellion. We must not be too nice in the choice of our agents. Non eget Mauri jaculis,no

African bayonets wanted,was well enough while we did not yet know the might of that desperate giant we

had to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve, white or black,is the safer motto now; for a good soldier, like a

good horse, cannot be of a bad color. The ironskins, as well as the ironclads, have already done us noble

service, and many a mother will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will welcome back the war worn

husband, whose smile would never again have gladdened his home, but that, cold in the shallow trench of the

battlefield, lies the halfburied form of the unchained bondsman whose dusky bosom sheathes the bullet

We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise. It may be long in coming,Heaven only

knows through what trials and humblings we may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly

arrayed and led to victory. We must be patient, as our fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we

must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than

it costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is disappointed in its

lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation

of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted majesty of the

Republic, and struck at her assailants so long as a drumbeat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers and sisters in

the bond of the American Union, you have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their

blood for your temporal salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of

the battlefield; nay, their own bodies are starred with bulletwounds and striped with sabrecuts, as if to

mark them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended. In

every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember

playing as children amidst the cloverblossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds with

strange Southern wildflowers blooming over them. By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of

fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children yet unborn, in the

name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the

sake of men everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the advancement of his

kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil report, in

triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad

continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the wall of

Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient inheritance, every fortress, every capital,

The personal revelations contained in my report of certain breakfast table conversations were so charitably

listened to and so good naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming over communicative.

Still, I should never have ventured to tell the trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my

brief story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining figure that trod the same path with me

for a time, or crossed it, leaving a momentary or lasting brightness in its track. I remember that, in furnishing

a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its dull aspect as I looked round on the blackwalnut chairs and

bedstead and bureau. "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to the key of that dark chest

of drawers," I said to the furnisher. It was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment

as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving reader,and to none other can such

tabletalk as this be addressed, I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with which I

shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is merely personal in my recollections.

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine loves, those pretty preludes of more

serious passions; by the great forfeitbasket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by the

long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken in years and unwieldy in person could

stimulate the sluggish faculties or check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample

chair,a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present Bishop of Delaware, became the

pupil of Master William Biglow. This generation is not familiar with his title to renown, although he fills

three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American Literature." He was a humorist

hardly robust enough for more than a brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the "Port School," because it was kept at

Cambridgeport, a mile from the College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much of it

marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared with the thriving College settlement. The

tenants of the many beautiful mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and Broadway

can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the "Opposition House" and the "Clark

House," these roads were almost all the way bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" of Main

Street, or were abreast of that forlorn "First Row" of Harvard Street. We called the boys of that locality

"Portchucks." They called us "Cambridgechucks," but we got along very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular loveliness. I once before referred to

her as "the golden blonde," but did not trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her appearance in the

school was almost as much a revelation to us boys as the appearance of Miranda was to Caliban. Her

abounding natural curls were so full of sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile and her voice

were so allsubduing, that half our heads were turned. Her fascinations were everywhere confessed a few

years afterwards; and when I last met her, though she said she was a grandmother, I questioned her statement,

for her winning looks and ways would still have made her admired in any company.

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very small, perhaps the youngest boy in

school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet, reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning to

enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer years. One of these two boys was destined to be

widely known, first in literature, as author of one of the most popular books of its time and which is freighted

for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer; a man who, if his countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent

in the national councils. Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears; he found it famous, and

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the schoolgirls of unlettered origin by that look which

rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age. She

came with the reputation of being "smart," as we should have called it, clever as we say nowadays. This was

Margaret Fuller, the only one among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke," like "Bettina," has slipped

the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as

"Margaret." Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other

thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader of what she used to call

"nawvels." I remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been

faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her

living. Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a watery,

aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A

remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements,

which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the

ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas, some would

say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened and

dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill

treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the viraginian

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a celebrity as Margaret. I remember being

greatly awed once, in our schooldays, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes were

brought home from the school for examination by my father, among them one of hers. I took it up with a

certain emulous interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a fivedollar one, at least,

I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a

crushing discovery of her superiority? I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about

the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders with her,she in a snowy cap, and I

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was to enter college. It seemed advisable

to give me a year of higher training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer advantages.

Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us. We had been up there, my father and myself, at

anniversaries. Some Boston boys of wellknown and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very

lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Willis,all promising

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of quiet by my temporary absence, but I have

wondered that there was not. Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true; but I

have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the exceptional kind. I had tendencies in the direction of

flageolets and octave flutes. I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty nearly,

except the housecat. Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime

in the barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for no maternal

or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and preparations were made that I might join the

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized from the pattern of my Lady

Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly along,kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,towards the seat of

learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's

tavern, with its sheltering tree and swinging sign; past the old powderhouse, looking like a colossal conical

ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the anteRevolutionary mansions; past Miss

Swan's great square boardingschool, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through the windy

corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous

murder done by its lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village centres, "Trapelo,"

"Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so

It was a shallow, twostory white house before which we stopped, just at the entrance of the central village,

the residence of a very worthy professor in the theological seminary,learned, amiable, exemplary, but

thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of homoousianism, or some such doctrine.

There was a great rock that showed its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but it

hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling to get uppermost in my youthful bosom; for

I was not too old for homesickness,who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave me at last.

I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the

window in the back of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to some widowed heart.

Seasickness and homesickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but time. Mine was not a bad case, but

it excited sympathy. There was an ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf, rustling

about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy

gentlewoman of the poorrelation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not with apples, and

stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda powder,

mingled the same in water, and encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific for seasickness, but it

was not for homesickness. The fiz was a mockery, and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my

despondent heart. I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on the water often

There was a soberfaced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began to make some advances to me,

and who, in spite of all the conditions surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the

most amusing, freespoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life. My roommate came later. He was the

son of a clergyman in a neighboring town,in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons

at Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I suspect; and I have no grudge

against him, except that once, when I was slightly indisposed, he administered to me,with the best

intentions, no doubt,a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr. Morrissey

would say,not quite into eternity, but so near it that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me

(after I had come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word of encouragement),

with that delightful plainness of speech which so brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never

should look any whiter when I was laid out as a corpse." After my roommate and I had been separated

twentyfive years, fate made us fellowtownsmen and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again

we are close literary neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him, in the last number

of the "Galaxy." Does it not sometimes seem as if we were all marching round and round in a circle, like the

supernumeraries who constitute the "army" of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is met by the same and

only the same people, or their doubles, twice, thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and uninteresting as our own "University

Building" at Cambridge, since the piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the

ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to "Harvard Hall." Two masters sat at the end of

the great room, the principal and his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the late

Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who looked kindly on me, and for whom I

always cherished a sincere regard, a clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant of

signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised myself to be amiable.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the budding time of life, and this clockdial,

perpetually twitting me with its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating

and whitening nostril, and a singularly malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of

murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His delight was to kick my shins

with all his might, under the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.

Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by

another boy, the son of a very distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his choice of

recreations, at least during school hours, than my late homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up

presently, and cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so? If the son of that boy's

father could not be trusted, what boy in Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to

be slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him out in the heart of the tower where

his father had shut him up for safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of one of its

eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle in my bosom! I parted from him, however, none the

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great distinction among the scholars of

the land. One day I observed a new boy in a seat not very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as I

recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at length I got a chance to look at them. Of all

the new comers during my whole year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, but

there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the morning of his entrance. His head was

between his hands (I wonder if he does not sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes

were fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him heir to a million. I feel sure that

Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive

portrait. Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less familiarly have faded from my

remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful student, sitting there entranced over the page of his

textbook,the childfather of the distinguished scholar that was to be,is not a picture framed and hung

up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.

My especial intimate was a fine, rosyfaced boy, not quite so free of speech as myself, perhaps, but with

qualities that promised a noble manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas Barnes,

and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the State of Maine, something will be heard to his

advantage from any honest and intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question. This was

one of two or three friendships that lasted. There were other friends and classmates, one of them a natural

humorist of the liveliest sort, who would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was so potently

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was Professor Moses Stuart. His house was

nearly opposite the one in which I resided and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the

Seminary. I have seen few more striking figures in my life than his, as I remember it. Tall, lean, with strong,

bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and impressiveness of

voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like

Cicero's, and his toga,that is his broadcloth cloak,was carried on his arm, whatever might have been the

weather, with such a statuelike rigid grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his throat, and his face "festooned"as I

heard Hillard say once, speaking of one of our College professorsin folds and wrinkles. Ill health gives a

certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed course which she follows in dismantling a human

countenance: the noblest and the fairest is but a death'shead decently covered over for the transient

ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before the procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the Professors. He had the firm fibre of a

theological athlete, and lived to be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half heterodoxy, as

old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,just as old doctors grow to be sparing of the more

exasperating drugs in their later days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long and so

exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the mediaeval schoolmen than amidst the

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world is waiting in dumb expectancy. In due

time the world seizes upon these wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of an

oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part heard of no more. We had two great men,

grown up both of them. Which was the more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we

debated. Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away early, and padding the other with

prosperity so that his course was comparatively noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one in

particular, "The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong obligation never to reveal.

The fate of William Morgan, which the community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a season of relief. One good lady, I was

told, was in the habit of asking students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for them.

Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual exercises, and a rudimentary form of

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in very shallow and simple sources. Yet a

kind of romance gilds for me the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact with

a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked across the

valley to the hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village

paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up again,

repeating sed revocare gradum. I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much

wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to be of

aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies.

The little Shawshine was our swimmingschool, and the great Merrimack, the right arm of four toiling cities,

was within reach of a morning stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities, for

he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living protest against the prevailing solemnities of the

locality. It did not take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this is apt to be so with young

people. What else could have made us think it great sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter and

"camp out,"on the floor of our room,with blankets disposed tentwise, except the fact that to a boy a

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the preceptors to see if he would not drop

dead while he was praying. He had a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and

told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him in turn, as one whom they were soon to

lose. More than one boy kept his eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the

man had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say the hope, of seeing the lion

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with my roommate, and how he led me to the

mighty bridge over the Merrimack which defied the icerafts of the river; and to the old meetinghouse,

where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient parsonage, with the bullethole in it through which

Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was

when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a

great city!for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have survived so far cares to know, included a

translation from Virgil, out of which I remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, which he treated

argumentatively and I rhetorically and sentimentally. My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted.

Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large hall upstairs, which hangs oddly enough

from the roof, suspended by iron rods. Subject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive, illustrating the

magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life into forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,the

gift of Heaven to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon to the monarch on his

throne; from the burning sands of the desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles, frombut I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. I went from the Academy to Harvard College, and did not

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover , for many years, I took the cars at noon, and in

an hour or a little more found myself at the station,just at the foot of the hill. My first pilgrimage was to the

old elm, which I remembered so well as standing by the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it

held, buried in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the Indians from chopping it

with their tomahawks. I then began the once familiar toil of ascending the long declivity. Academic villages

seem to change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns down with all its books. A new edifice

or two may be put up, and a new library begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor,

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story of them must be told succinctly. It is

like the opiumsmoker's showing you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the new library building on my left.

But for these it was surprising to see how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. The

Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage coach landed its passengers at the Mansion

House as of old. The pale brick seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and

"Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge, carried there in the night by orthodox angels, perhaps,

like the Santa Casa. Away to my left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and

in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I lived a year in the days of James

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he knew so well. I went to the front of the

house. There was the great rock showing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on that,

whispered the small ghost. I looked in at the upper window in the farther part of the house. I looked out of

that on four long changing seasons, said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, but, while I was

looking, one came into the small garden, or what used to be the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted

from my investigation and went on my way. The apparition that put me and my little ghost to flight had a

dressinggown on its person and a gun in its hand. I think it was the dressinggown, and not the gun, which

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after passing what I think used to be Jonathan

Leavitt's bookbindery, and here is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy building.

Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of

ninepin balls, and the crash of tumbling pins from those precincts? The little ghost said, Never! It cannot be.

But it was. " Have they a billiardroom in the upper story?" I asked myself. "Do the theological professors

take a hand at allfours or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular columns of the 'Boston

Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoralized for the moment, it is plain; but now that I have recovered from the

shock, I must say that the fact mentioned seems to show a great advance in common sense from the notions

I sauntered,we, rather, my ghost and I,until we came to a broken field where there was quarrying and

digging going on,our old base ball ground, hard by the burialplace. There I paused; and if any

thoughtful boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has sown with memories of the time when he

was young shall follow my footsteps, I need not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be enchained by the

noble view before him. Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in

along encircling ridge of pale blue waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline

with perfect definition against the sky. This was a sight which had more virtue and refreshment in it than any

aspect of nature that I had looked upon, I am afraid I must say for years. I have been by the seaside now and

then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to what the winds

have to say and getting angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to

those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging mountains,Monadnock,

Kearsarge,what memories that name recalls!and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the

eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her bravest and

hardiest children,I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there

is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy

with human hearts. It is more than a year since I have looked on those blue mountains, and they "are to me as

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burialground. It was thinly tenanted as I remember it, but now

populous with the silent immigrants of more than a whole generation. There lay the dead I had left, the two or

three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom in those days

hearts were still aching, and by whose memory the house still seemed haunted. A few upright stones were all

that I recollect. But now, around them were the monuments of many of the dead whom I remembered as

living. I doubt if there has been a more faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long

day. I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often heard as they thundered their

doctrines down upon me from the thronelike desk. Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower

pulpit, from an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's Concordance, but there was an eloquence in

their voices the listening chapel had never known. There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions,

but none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the restingplace of one of the children of the

very learned Professor Robinson: "Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well."

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old men, as my little ghost called them,

appeared on the scene to answer to the gravedigger and his companion. They christened a mountain or two

for me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of which the most curious was

"Basil's Cave." The story was recent, when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his

name might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally extravagant, and of more or

less lawless habits. He had commanded a cave to be secretly dug, and furnished it sumptuously, and there

with his companions indulged in revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated locality had never looked

upon. How much truth there was in it all I will not pretend to say, but I seem to remember stamping over

every rock that sounded hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once Basil's Cave.

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter under which to partake of the hermit fare I

had brought with me. Following the slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a pleasant clump

of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so as to give a seat, a table, and a shade. I left my benediction on

this pretty little natural caravansera, and a brief record on one of its white birches, hoping to visit it again on

Two scenes remained to look upon,the Shawshine River and the Indian Ridge. The streamlet proved to

have about the width with which it flowed through my memory. The young men and the boys were bathing in

its shallow current, or dressing and undressing upon its banks as in the days of old; the same river, only the

water changed; "The same boys, only the names and the accidents of local memory different," I whispered to

The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I expected of it. It is well worth a long ride to visit. The lofty

wooded bank is a mile and a half in extent, with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general running nearly

parallel with it, one of them still longer. These singular formations are supposed to have been built up by the

eddies of conflicting currents scattering sand and gravel and stones as they swept over the continent. But I

think they pleased me better when I was taught that the Indians built them; and while I thank Professor

Hitchcock, I sometimes feel as if I should like to found a chair to teach the ignorance of what people do not

But the little ghost whispered, "When you leave this place you leave me behind you."

I believe the boyshadow still lingers around the wellremembered scenes I traversed on that day, and that,

The priest is dead for the Protestant world. Luther's inkstand did not kill the devil, but it killed the priest, at

least for us: He is a loss in many respects to be regretted. He kept alive the spirit of reverence. He was looked

up to as possessing qualities superhuman in their nature, and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and

their defence against the strong. If one end of religion is to make men happier in this world as well as in the

next, mankind lost a great source of happiness when the priest was reduced to the common level of humanity,

and became only a minister. Priest, which was presbyter, corresponded to senator, and was a title to respect

and honor. Minister is but the diminutive of magister, and implies an obligation to render service.

It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine mission they should have the power of

casting out devils and talking in strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink poisons with

impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and they should recover. The Roman Church claims some of

these powers for its clergy and its sacred objects to this day. Miracles, it is professed, are wrought by them, or

through them, as in the days of the apostles. Protestantism proclaims that the age of such occurrences as the

apostles witnessed is past. What does it know about miracles? It knows a great many records of miracles, but

The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for

his amiable qualities, but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in the Roman Church.

Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault with, but it has a very real meaning. "The essential point in the

notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being

necessary or beneficial to us morally,an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of

course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man,

but that he had a special power, quite independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were,

mechanically; that out of him went a virtue, as from the hem of his Master's raiment, to those with whom his

It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible personality of like nature with

themselves as a mediator between them and the heavenly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing,

the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a

hand which is the channel of communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege of

those who looked and those who still look up to a priesthood. It has been said, and many who have walked

the hospitals or served in the dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the Roman

Catholics know how to die. The same thing is less confidently to be said of Protestants. How frequently is the

story told of the most exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the lives of the most

exemplary Protestant ministers, that they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last days! The blessing of

the viaticum is unknown to them. Man is essentially an idolater,that is, in bondage to his imagination,

for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin word imago. He wants a visible image

to fix his thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time what these

were to the ancient Egyptians. He wants a vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him

godspeed on his last journey. Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity would have dared to

say to the monarch just laying his head on the block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"?

It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize the American Protestant descendant of the

ancient priesthood. The history of the Congregationalists in New England would show us how this change

has gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit come down

to the level of the rostrum, and the clergyman take on the character of a popular lecturer who deals with every

Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a right to be proud of our Pilgrim and Puritan

fathers among the clergy. They were ready to do and to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith which

breeds heroes is better than an unbelief which leaves nothing worth being a hero for. Only let us be fair, and

not defend the creed of Mohammed because it nurtured brave men and enlightened scholars, or refrain from

condemning polygamy in our admiration of the indomitable spirit and perseverance of the Pilgrim Fathers of

Mormonism, or justify an inhuman belief, or a cruel or foolish superstition, because it was once held or

acquiesced in by men whose nobility of character we heartily recognize. The New England clergy can look

back to a noble record, but the pulpit has sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may sometimes

>From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers have furnished the highest type of

character to the people among whom they have lived. They have lost to a considerable extent the position of

leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked upon as representatives of their congregations, they

represent what is best among those of whom they are the speaking organs. We have a right to expect them to

be models as well as teachers of all that makes the best citizens for this world and the next, and they have not

been, and are not in these later days unworthy of their high calling. They have worked hard for small earthly

compensation. They have been the most learned men the country had to show, when learning was a scarce

commodity. Called by their consciences to selfdenying labors, living simply, often halfsupported by the

toil of their own hands, they have let the light, such light as shone for them, into the minds of our

communities as the settler's axe let the sunshine into their loghuts and farmhouses.

Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a few instances will illustrate. Often, as was

just said, they toiled like daylaborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small inclosures of land, for the New

England soil is not one that "laughs when tickled with a hoe," but rather one that sulks when appealed to with

that persuasive implement. The father of the eminent Boston physician whose recent loss is so deeply

regretted, the Reverend Pitt Clarke, fortytwo years pastor of the small fold in the town of Norton,

Massachusetts, was a typical example of this union of the two callings, and it would be hard to find a story of

a more wholesome and useful life, within a limited and isolated circle, than that which the pious care of one

of his children commemorated. Sometimes the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward of

StratfordonAvon, in old England, joined the practice of medicine to the offices of his holy profession.

Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of "The Day of Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of

Harvard College, were instances of this twofold service. In politics their influence has always been felt, and

in many cases their drums ecclesiastic have beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it

ever sounded in the slumbering camp. Samuel Cooper sat in council with the leaders of the Revolution in

Boston. The three Northamptonborn brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and,

when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty. In later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried

politics into their pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times still more recent.

The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office, tended, to give the New England clergy of

past generations a kind of aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days when class

distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at present. Their costume added to the effect of their bodily

presence, as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember the last of the "fair, white, curly"

wigs, as it graced the imposing figure of the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can testify.

They were not only learned in the history of the past, but they were the interpreters of the prophecy, and

announced coming events with a confidence equal to that with which the weatherbureau warns us of a

coming storm. The numbers of the book of Daniel and the visions of the Revelation were not too hard for

them. In the commonplace book of the Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, made, as

it appears, about the year 1773: "Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichrist, after many

things had been said upon the subject, the Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this manner: 'Tell

your children to tell their children that in the year 1866 something notable will happen in the church; tell

The "old man" came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if we consider what took place in the decade

from 1860 to 1870. In 1864 the Pope issued the "Syllabus of Errors," which "must be considered by

Romanistsas an infallible official document, and which arrays the papacy in open war against modern

civilization and civil and religious freedom." The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to be the bishop

of bishops, and immediately after this began the decisive movement of the party known as the "Old

Catholics." In the exact year looked forward to by the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of Rome

by the French and the publication of "Ecce Homo" appear to be the most remarkable events having Special

relation to the religious world. Perhaps the National Council of the Congregationalists, held at Boston in

The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later period. "In half a century," said the

venerable Dr. Porter of Conway, New Hampshire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans,

Unitarians, or Methodists." The halfcentury has more than elapsed, and the prediction seems to stand in

The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggybrowed old minister of Medford, that he had expressed his

belief that not more than one soul in two thousand would be saved. Seeing a knot of his parishioners in

debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that they were questioning which of the

Medford people was the elected one, the population being just two thousand, and that opinion was divided

whether it would be the minister or one of his deacons. The story may or may not be literally true, but it

illustrates the popular belief of those days, that the clergyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of the

The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied accomplishments of some of the New England

clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the

pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred

years' experience of eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription:" Ezroe Stiles, 1766. Olim e

libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand lens before

me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince of Salem, an earlier

student of science in the town since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute. Jeremy Belknap holds

an honored place in that unpretending row of local historians. And in the pages of his "History of New

Hampshire" may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects,

among all the older clergymen preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer,

colonist, legislator in state and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court

of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him. This manifold individual

was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,the Reverend

Manasseh Cutler. These reminiscences from surrounding objects came up unexpectedly, of themselves: and

have a right here, as showing how wide is the range of intelligence in the clerical body thus accidentally

It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added that they were often the wits and humorists

of their localities. Mather Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these were, for the

most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater

perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's "Annals of the American Pulpit"

tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences." He has not

recorded the following, which is to be found in Miss Larned's excellent and most interesting History of

Windham County, Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut,

about the year 1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers. The

"sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions. A specimen

or two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages which follow in a goodnatured frame of mind. "If

unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a

whiteoak." Some of his ministerial associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of

admonition to the offending clergyman. " Mr. Dwight received their reproofs with great meekness, frankly

acknowledged his faults, and promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for the

brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old ministers in one's veins. An English bishop

proclaimed the fact before an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say that he had

a son who was a doctor. Very kind that was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience must have

felt. Perhaps he was not ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, "the beloved physician," or even of the teachings

which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter. So a NewEnglander, even

if he were a bishop, need not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a minister. On

the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a

bringing up in a library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than

one of his father's or grandfather's folios. What are the names of ministers' sons which most readily occur to

our memory as illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton,

were all ministers' boys. John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the clergyman after whom he was named.

George Ticknor was next door to such a descent, for his father was a deacon. This is a group which it did not

Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to exercise a good deal of authority in the

communities to which they belonged. The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a tendency to

rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism levels in religion as in everything. It might have been

expected, therefore, that soon after civil liberty had been established there would be conflicts between the

traditional, authority of the minister and the claims of the now free and independent congregation. So it was,

in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, for which the reader is indebted to Miss Lamed's book,

The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the

town of Pomfret, Connecticut. Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham "Herald,"

in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with all the emphasis of italics and small capitals. Was it not

time, he said, for people to look about them and see whether "such despotism was founded in Scripture, in

reason, in policy, or on the rights of man! A minister, by his vote, by his single voice, may negative the

unanimous vote of the church! Are ministers composed of finer clay than the rest of mankind, that entitles

them to this preeminence? Does a license to preach transform a man into a higher order of beings and endow

him with a natural quality to govern? Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to be

governed? Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to such degrading vassalage and abject

submission? Reason, common sense, and the Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that they are

all born free and equal; that every member of a church or Christian congregation must be on the same footing

in respect of church government, and that the CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one the power to

negative the vote of all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND

The Reverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing him to be "destitute of delicacy,

decency, good manners, sound judgment, honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat'spaw, the

infamous tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock, and a ragamuffin."

No FourthofJuly orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no clergyman would use such language

as that of the Reverend Moses Welch. The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or

three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion of their special dignities or privileges.

The public is better bred than to carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political brawlers

would hardly think admissible. The minister of religion is generally treated with something more than

respect; he is allowed to say undisputed what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. Bishop Gilbert

Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject with a friend who was not convinced by his

arguments. "Wait till you hear me from the pulpit," he said; "there you cannot answer me." The preacherif

I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself to himhas his hearer's head in chancery, and

can administer punishment ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images,

borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a word of comment or a look of

One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen has lately ventured to question

whether all his professional brethren invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been sharply

criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits silent in his pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them

is the right of questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged eminence of the pulpit, or

in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher. It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote

these words: "I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride)

of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoods,

in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend Increase Mather, president of

Harvard College, burned publicly in the college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out

earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those judicial murders for witchcraft, the

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors. The old reproach against physicians,

that where there were three of them together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that

which was intended by the sharptongued ecclesiastic who first uttered it. Undoubtedly there is a strong

tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and

diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and

ignorant ages. It is impossible, or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of

Naturewhose diary is the book he reads oftenestto heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can

be done under the given conditions,it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where wounds cannot

heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of

suffering, where the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being tormented is the

only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity

has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a

On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as well as for his peculiarly professional

virtue of charity,led upward by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own

eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not

have been ashamed of; and if this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be

surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd of medical "atheists."

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations as those to which belong the healers

of the body and the headers of the mind. There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them into

hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view the welfare of their fellowcreatures. But

there is a territory always liable to be differed about between them. There are patients who never tell their

physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their ailments. He goes through his accustomed routine with

them, and thinks he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no deeper into the breast

than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than the wrist. A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the

patient's bedside,not with the professional look on his face which suggests the undertaker and the sexton,

but with a serene countenance and a sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right

moment,will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the

terror which underlies all the bodily symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul

is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world. And, on the other hand, there are many

nervous and oversensitive natures which have been wrought up by selftorturing spiritual exercises until

Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants that he is subject to what are known to

the records of insanity as hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears, and sees

devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose that

his mental conflicts, after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to a state of

despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by

knife, halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit suicide. Is

not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as melancholia? Would not any prudent physician

keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least, partial mental

alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its

counterpart has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of selfdestruction, which

came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is

taken is, next to the Bible and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the bestknown religious work of

Christendom. If Bunyan and his contemporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over the case of Christian

at the time when be was meditating selfmurder, it is very possible that there might have been a difference of

judgment. The physician would have one advantage in such a consultation. He would pretty certainly have

received a Christian education, while the clergyman would probably know next to nothing of the laws or

manifestations of mental or bodily disease. It does not seem as if any theological student was really prepared

for his practical duties until he had learned something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all,

had become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an insane asylum.

It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to the divine in the same light as the divine

stands to the physician, so far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to the other's

profession. Many physicians know a great deal more about religious matters than they do about medicine.

They have read the Bible ten times as much as they ever read any medical author. They have heard scores of

sermons for one medical lecture to which they have listened. They often hear much better preaching than the

average minister, for he hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of them. They have now

and then been distinguished in theology as well as in their own profession. The name of Servetus might call

up unpleasant recollections, but that of another medical practitioner may be safely mentioned. "It was not till

the middle of the last century that the question as to the authorship of the Pentateuch was handled with

anything like a discerning criticism. The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might have

supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation." This layman was "Astruc, doctor and

professor of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV." The quotation is from

the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," which, of course, lies on the table of the least

instructed clergyman. The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor by giving the practitioner of

medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tarwater," and the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman

whose sands of life"but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton Mather shares with

Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America. The professions should

be cordial allies, but the churchgoing, Bible reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the

subjects included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be expected to know of

medicine. To say, as has been said not long since, that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with

the latter as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in

the family of the one who says it. What a set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after a

quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any

opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or trying to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not believe, or only half believe, what he

preaches. But pews without heads in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the doubter

and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on pine and mahogany by his discourses, and

the more wood he sees as he looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being useful. It is

natural that in times like the present changes of faith and of place of worship should be far from infrequent. It

is not less natural that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on the other, when such changes

occur. It even happens occasionally that the regrets become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side

which receives the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite conceivable that the

Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as

guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of

murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard

any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the Protestant fold there are

many compartments, and it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to another.

So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to happen a great deal oftener than they

do. All the larger bodies of Christians should be constantly exchanging members. All men are born with

conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally with the idolworshippers or the idolbreakers.

Some wear their fathers' old clothes, and some will have a new suit. One class of men must have their faith

hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument.

Members of one of these classes often find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other. The late Orestes

A. Brownson used to preach at one time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper room, where some of

them got from him their first lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing with the books

they hold sacred. But after a time Mr. Brownson found he had mistaken his church, and went over to the

Roman Catholic establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one of the most stalwart

champions. Nature is prolific and ambidextrous. While this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the

ancient faith, another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying just as hard to provide a new church

for the future. One was driving the sheep into the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the bars that

kept them out of the new pasture. Neither of these powerful men could do the other's work, and each had to

The "old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls it, carries many who would steer by the wake of their

vessel. But there are many others who do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having their eyes

fixed on the lighthouse in the distance before them. In less figurative language, there are multitudes of

persons who are perfectly contented with the old formulae of the church with which they and their fathers

before them have been and are connected, for the simple reason that they fit, like old shoes, because they

have been worn so long, and mingled with these, in the most conservative religious body, are here and there

those who are restless in the fetters of a confession of faith to which they have pledged themselves without

believing in it. This has been true of the Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more or

less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson, stood alone in wishing the church were well rid of it. In

fact, it has happened to the present writer to hear the Thirtynine Articles summarily disposed of by one of

the most zealous members of the American branch of that communion, in a verb of one syllable, more

But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons among the socalled "liberal"

denominations who are uneasy for want of a more definite ritual and a more formal organization than they

find in their own body. Now, the rector or the minister must be well aware that there are such cases, and each

of them must be aware that there are individuals under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by argument, and

who really belong by all their instincts to another communion. It seems as if a thoroughly honest,

straightcollared clergyman would say frankly to his restless parishioner: "You do not believe the central

doctrines of the church which you are in the habit of attending. You belong properly to Brother A.'s or

Brother B.'s fold, and it will be more manly and probably more profitable for you to go there than to stay with

us." And, again, the rolling collared clergyman might be expected to say to this or that uneasy listener: "You

are longing for a church which will settle your beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the task,

to which you seem to be unequal, of working out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Go over the

way to Brother C.'s or Brother D.'s; your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a backboard which will

keep you straight and make you comfortable." Patients are not the property of their physicians, nor

As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will adhere to the general belief professed by

their fathers. But they do not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world all before them to

choose their creed from, like other persons. They are sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas

they are supposed to have heard preached from their childhood. They cannot defend themselves, for various

good reasons. If they did, one would have to say he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at

last to feel about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners' children do about candy. Another would have

to own that he got his religious belief, not from his father, but from his mother. That would account for a

great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the

motherly cow softens the virulence of smallpox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity.

Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his greatgrandfather, as some do

their complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister

had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his

family history, and, therefore, it is an ill bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, as

if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common

delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from his father, but from somebody else,

perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned

It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman to call the attention of the clergy to the

shortcomings and errors, not only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of which they are

the intellectual and moral product. This is especially true when the authority of great names is fallen back

upon as a defence of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld. It may be very important to show

that the champions of this or that set of dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs, while others

retain their vitality, held certain general notions which vitiated their conclusions. And in proportion to the

eminence of such champions, and the frequency with which their names are appealed to as a bulwark of any

particular creed or set of doctrines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or extravagances or

In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just and proper to show the agency of the

Mathers, father and son, in the witchcraft delusion. It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf the common

beliefs of their time. It would be an extenuation of their acts that, not many years before, the great and good

magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witchcraft. To fall back

on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro conscientace: The houses

they dwelt in may have had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any

rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads.

Still more, if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the best thing we can do

is to leave it and persuade others to leave it if we can. And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of Jonathan Edwards for examination in a

recent essay. The "Edwardsian" theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination to

which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it is thrown into the scale of theological belief

as if it added great strength to the party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments

and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that be was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a

proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession

from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his

conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his

system of beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable a logician

recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he

presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, "are young vipers, and

are infinitely more hateful than vipers;" when he gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and

endless tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for "the bulk of mankind;" when he

cruelly pictures a future in which parents are to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into

the furnace, where they are to lie "roasting" forever,we have a right to say that the man who held such

beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the

creed with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception

of human destiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian

If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some appear to think, we might expect to see the

change showing itself in catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief from its horrors

in all our churches, and no longer to read in the newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy

because they could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be so or not, it must be

owned that the name of Jonathan Edwards does at this day carry a certain authority with it for many persons,

so that anything he believed gains for them some degree of probability from that circumstance. It would,

therefore, be of much interest to know whether he was trustworthy in his theological speculations, and

whether he ever changed his belief with reference to any of the great questions above alluded to.

Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years ago that a certain M. Babinet, a

scientific Frenchman of note, had predicted a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live by

the collision with it of a great comet then approaching us, or some such occurrence. There is no doubt that

this prediction produced anxiety and alarm in many timid persons. It became a very interesting question with

them who this M. Babinet might be. Was he a sound observer, who had made other observations and

predictions which had proved accurate? Or was he one of those men who are always making blunders for

other people to correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching disastrous event?

So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so long as there was even one who

believed that he, and his family, and his nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its

monuments, were very soon to be smitten in midheaven and instantly shivered into fragments, it was very

desirable to find any evidence that this prophet of evil was a man who held many extravagant and even

monstrous opinions. Still more satisfactory would it be if it could be shown that he had reconsidered his

predictions, and declared that he could not abide by his former alarming conclusions. And we should think

very ill of any astronomer who would not rejoice for the sake of his fellowcreatures, if not for his own, to

find the threatening presage invalidated in either or both of the ways just mentioned, even though he had

But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a planet and its inhabitants to the infinite

catastrophe which shall establish a mighty world of eternal despair? And which is it most desirable for

mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of the threat of M. Babinet, or those of the other

infinitely more terrible comminations, so far as they rest on the authority of Jonathan Edwards?

The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of the writings of Edwards, with reference to the

essay he had in contemplation, when, on speaking of the subject to a very distinguished orthodox divine, this

gentleman mentioned the existence of a manuscript of Edwards which had been held back from the public on

account of some opinions or tendencies it contained, or was suspected of containing "High Arianism" was the

exact expression he used with reference to it. On relating this fact to an illustrious man of science, whose

name is best known to botanists, but is justly held in great honor by the orthodox body to which he belongs, it

appeared that he, too, had heard of such a manuscript, and the questionable doctrine associated with it in his

memory was Sabellianism. It was of course proper in the writer of an essay on Jonathan Edwards to mention

the alleged existence of such a manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have been

exercised as that which led, the editor of his collected works to suppress the language Edwards had used

This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and one of the professors in the theological

school at Andover, and finally to the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason, had been withheld

from publication for more than a century. Its title is "Observations concerning the Scripture OEconomy of the

Trinity and Covenant of Redemption. By Jonathan Edwards." It contains thirtysix pages and a half, each

small page having about two hundred words. The pages before the reader will be found to average about three

hundred and twentyfive words. An introduction and an appendix by the editor, Professor Egbert C. Smyth,

swell the contents to nearly a hundred pages, but these additions, and the circumstance that it is bound in

boards, must not lead us to overlook the fact that the little volume is nothing more than a pamphlet in book's

A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the arrangements entered into by the three

persons of the Trinity, in as bald and matteroffact language and as commercial a spirit as if the author had

been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership between three retail tradesmen. But, lest a layman's

judgment might be considered insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer to one of the most learned

of our theological experts,the same who once informed a church dignitary, who had been attempting to

define his theological position, that he was a Eutychian,a fact which he seems to have been no more aware

of than M. Jourdain was conscious that he had been speaking prose all his life. The treatise appeared to this

professor antitrinitarian, not in the direction of Unitarianism, however, but of Tritheism. Its

anthropomorphism affected him like blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense of "great disgust,"

All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work of Edwards referred to by the present writer

in his previous essay. The tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by Dr. Bushnell, in

1851, but of this reference by him the writer never heard until after his own essay was already printed. The

manuscript of the "Observations" was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us in his introduction, about

fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend William T. Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his

But the reference of the present writer was to another production of the great logician, thus spoken of in a

quotation from "the accomplished editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'" to be found in Professor Smyth's

"It has long been a matter of private information that Professor Edwards A. Park, of Andover, had in his

possession an published manuscript of Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two thirds as long as his

treatise on the will. As few have ever seen the manuscript, its contents are only known by vague reports.... It

is said that it contains a departure from his published views on the Trinity and a modification of the view of

original sin. One account of it says that the manuscript leans toward Sabellianism, and that it even approaches

It was to this "suppressed" manuscript the present writer referred, and not to the slender brochure recently

given to the public. He is bound, therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be still in doubt

with reference to Edwards's theological views, it would be necessary to submit this manuscript, and all

manuscripts of his which have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if possible, so that all could

The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an eternity of unimaginable horrors for

"the bulk of mankind." His authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects great numbers as

the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: "Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains." This belief is one which it

is infinitely desirable to the human race should be shown to be possibly, probably, or certainly erroneous. It

is, therefore, desirable in the interest of humanity that any force the argument in its favor may derive from

Edwards's authority should be weakened by showing that he was capable of writing most unwisely, and if it

should be proved that he changed his opinions, or ran into any "heretical" vagaries, by using these facts

against the validity of his judgment. That he was capable of writing most unwisely has been sufficiently

shown by the recent publication of his "Observations." Whether he, anywhere contradicted what were

generally accepted as his theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed into heresies, the public will

never rest satisfied until it sees and interprets for itself everything that is open to question which may be

contained in his yet unpublished manuscripts. All this is not in the least a personal affair with the writer, who,

in the course of his studies of Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable sources

sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have been familiar to many, that there was

unpublished matter bearing on the opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been

toiling. And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as Edwards has been considered, so good a man as

he is recognized to have been, had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think of children as vipers,

and of parents as shouting hallelujahs while their lost darlings were being driven into the flames, where is the

theologian who would not rejoice to hope so with him or who would be willing to tell his wife or his daughter

The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant communities is into Christian optimists and

Christian pessimists. The Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by a cheerful

countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised enjoyment of earthly comforts, and a short confession

of faith. His theory of the universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a Father with all the true paternal

attributes, of man that he is destined to come into harmony with the keynote of divine order, of this earth

that it is a training school for a better sphere of existence. The Christian pessimist in his most typical

manifestation is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to

undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to insist on a more extended list of articles of belief. His theory of

the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea of the Creator is that of a ruler whose

pardoning power is subject to the veto of what is called "justice;" his notion of man is that he is born a natural

hater of God and goodness, and that his natural destiny is eternal misery. The line dividing these two great

classes zigzags its way through the religious community, sometimes following denominational layers and

cleavages, sometimes going, like a geological fracture, through many different strata. The natural antagonists

of the religious pessimists are the men of science, especially the evolutionists, and the poets. It was but a

conditioned prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was in Milton's mind when he sang, in one of the divinest of

And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who

painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the

verge of selfmurder,painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank

him with the great authors of all time,kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired

ploughman, whose songs have done more to humanize the hard theology of Scotland than all the rationalistic

sermons that were ever preached. Our own Whittier has done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit

than Burns, for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New England belongs. Let me

sweeten these closing paragraphs of an essay not meaning to hold a word of bitterness with a passage or two

from the laypreacher who is listened to by a larger congregation than any man who speaks from the pulpit.

Who will not hear his words with comfort and rejoicing when he speaks of "that larger hope which, secretly

cherished from the times of Origen and Duns Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting

It is Tennyson's "In Memoriam" to which he refers, and from which he quotes four verses, of which this is the

If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and the rapidly growing change of opinion

renders unnecessary any further effort to humanize "the Gospel of dread tidings;" if any believe the doctrines

of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster divines are so far obsolete as to require no further

handling; if there are any who thank these subjects have lost their interest for living souls ever since they

themselves have learned to stay at home on Sundays, with their cakes and ale instead of going to meeting,

not such is Mr. Whittier's opinion, as we may infer from his recent beautiful poem, "The Minister's

Daughter." It is not science alone that the old Christian pessimism has got to struggle with, but the instincts of

childhood, the affections of maternity, the intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the philanthropist,

in short, human nature and the advance of civilization. The pulpit has long helped the world, and is still

one of the chief defences against the dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now, as it always has been

in its best representation, of all love and honor. But many of its professed creeds imperatively demand

revision, and the pews which call for it must be listened to, or the preacher will by and by find himself