Who paint those years, with all their scenes?--the hard-fought
engagements--the defeats, plans, failures--the gloomy hours, days,
when our Nationality seem'd hung in pall of doubt, perhaps death--the
Mephistophelean sneers of foreign lands and attaches--the dreaded
Scylla of European interference, and the Charybdis of the tremendously
dangerous latent strata of secession sympathizers throughout the free
States, (far more numerous than is supposed)--the long marches in
summer--the hot sweat, and many a sunstroke, as on the rush to
Gettysburg in '63--the night battles in the woods, as under Hooker
at Chancellorsville--the camps in winter--the military prisons--the
hospitals--(alas! alas! the hospitals.)
The secession war? Nay, let me call it the Union war. Though whatever
call'd, it is even yet too near us--too vast and too closely
overshadowing--its branches unform'd yet, (but certain,) shooting too
far into the future--and the most indicative and mightiest of them yet
ungrown. A great literature will yet arise out of the era of those
four years, those scenes--era compressing centuries of native passion,
first-class pictures, tempests of life and death--an inexhaustible
mine for the histories, drama, romance, and even philosophy, of
peoples to come--indeed the verteber of poetry and art, (of personal
character too,) for all future America--far more grand, in my opinion,
to the hands capable of it, than Homer's siege of Troy, or the French
wars to Shakspere.
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