I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize that it is
finally from what I learn'd personally mixing in such scenes that I am
now penning these pages. One night in the gloomiest period of the war,
in the Patent-office hospital in Washington city, as I stood by
the bedside of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick
approaching death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, spiritual
manner, the veteran surgeon, turning aside, said to me, that though he
had witness'd many, many deaths of soldiers, and had been a worker at
Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, &c., he had not seen yet the first
case of man or boy that met the approach of dissolution with cowardly
qualms or terror. My own observation fully bears out the remark.
What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and argument,
the plentifully-supplied, last-needed proof of democracy, in its
personalities? Curiously enough, too, the proof on this point comes,
I should say, every bit as much from the south, as from the north.
Although I have spoken only of the latter, yet I deliberately include
all. Grand, common stock! to me the accomplish'd and convincing
growth, prophetic of the future; proof undeniable to sharpest sense,
of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never feudal lord, nor
Greek, nor Roman breed, yet rival'd. Let no tongue ever speak in
disparagement of the American races, north or south, to one who has
been through the war in the great army hospitals.
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