Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 9.pdf/685

674 Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate,"&mdash;and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and, perchance, as it has never set before,&mdash;where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

would be a task worthy of a volume, and requiring that space in order to be creditability performed, to show how war affects literature, at what points they meet, where they are at variance, if any wars stimulate, and what kinds depress the intellectual life of nations. The subject is very wide. It would embrace a discussion of the effects of war when it occurs during a period of great literary and artistic splendor, as in Athens and in the Italian Republics; whether intellectual decline is postponed or accelerated by the interests and passions of the strife; whether the preliminary concentration of the popular heart may claim the merit of adding either power or beauty to the intellectual forms which bloom together with the war.

These things are not entirely clear, and the experience of different countries is conflicting. The Thirty Years' War, though it commenced with the inspiration of great political and religious ideas, did not lift the German mind to any new demonstrations of truth or impassioned utterances of the imagination. The nation sank away from it into a barren and trivial life although the war itself occasioned a multitude of poems, songs, hymns,