,)--Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest
--Vicksburgh--Chattanooga--the trenches of Petersburgh--the
numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere--the crop reap'd by
the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations--and blackest
and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the
prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante's
pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments,
excell'd those prisons)--the dead, the dead, the dead--_our_ dead--or
South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)--or East
or West--Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley--somewhere they
crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of
hills--(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach'd bones,
tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found
yet)--our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us--the
son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend
from the dear friend--the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the
Carolinas, and in Tennessee--the single graves left in the woods or by
the roadside, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)--the corpses floated
down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down
the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee,
following Gettysburgh)--some lie at the bottom of the sea--the general
million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States--the
infinite dead--(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their
impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and
shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn,
and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)--not only
Northern dead leavening Southern soil--thousands, aye tens of
thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.
Pages:
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143