Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/373

Rh attitude towards all war is the same as our own. She has no use for its pinchbeck glory, but looks beyond all that and sees what Longfellow saw when he wrote 'Killed at the Ford':

For the blood-drops on the conqueror's laurel are not from the brow that wears it. During that war of North and South which stirred the conscience of America to its depths the Quaker Whittier sorrowed in his poems In War Time that a democratic people should have no other but the old world's barbarous way of settling its differences, saying, as we are saying at present:

The future's gain

Is certain as God's truth; but meanwhile, pain

Is bitter and tears are salt; our voices take

A sober tone; our very household songs

Are heavy with a nation's griefs and wrongs;

And innocent mirth is chastened for the sake