The preceding notes may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life,
and into those lurid interiors, never to be fully convey'd to the
future. The hospital part of the drama from '61 to '65, deserves
indeed to be recorded. Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden
and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments
of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable
campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green
armies, the drafts and bounties--the immense money expenditure, like a
heavy-pouring constant rain--with, over the whole land, the last three
years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning-wail of women,
parents, orphans--the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army
Hospitals--(it seem'd sometimes as if the whole interest of the land,
North and South, was one vast central hospital, and all the rest of
the affair but flanges)--those forming the untold and unwritten history
of the war--infinitely greater (like life's) than the few scraps and
distortions that are ever told or written. Think how much, and of
importance, will be--how much, civic and military, has already been
--buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.
AN INTERREGNUM PARAGRAPH
Several years now elapse before I resume my diary. I continued at
Washington working in the Attorney-General's department through '66
and '67, and some time afterward. In February '73 I was stricken down
by paralysis, gave up my desk, and migrated to Camden, New Jersey,
where I lived during '74 and '75, quite unwell--but after that began
to grow better; commenc'd going for weeks at a time, even for months,
down in the country, to a charmingly recluse and rural spot along
Timber creek, twelve or thirteen miles from where it enters the
Delaware river.
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