I wander'd to and fro till the
moist moon set, long after midnight.
SPIRITUAL CHARACTERS AMONG THE SOLDIERS
Every now and then, in hospital or camp, there are beings I
meet--specimens of unworldliness, disinterestedness, and animal purity
and heroism--perhaps some unconscious Indianian, or from Ohio or
Tennessee--on whose birth the calmness of heaven seems to have
descended, and whose gradual growing up, whatever the circumstances
of work-life or change, or hardship, or small or no education that
attended it, the power of a strange spiritual sweetness, fibre and
inward health, have also attended. Something veil'd and abstracted is
often a part of the manners of these beings. I have met them, I say,
not seldom in the army, in camp, and in the hospitals. The Western
regiments contain many of them. They are often young men, obeying
the events and occasions about them, marching, soldiering, righting,
foraging, cooking, working on farms or at some trade before the
war--unaware of their own nature, (as to that, who is aware of his own
nature?) their companions only understanding that they are different
from the rest, more silent, "something odd about them," and apt to go
off and meditate and muse in solitude.
CATTLE DROVES ABOUT WASHINGTON
Among other sights are immense droves of cattle with their drivers,
passing through the streets of the city. Some of the men have a way
of leading the cattle by a peculiar call, a wild, pensive hoot, quite
musical, prolong'd, indescribable, sounding something between the
cooing of a pigeon and the hoot of an owl.
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