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142 and the best of a nation, should put his genius under the influence of that magnificent spectacle for the space of half an hour. The theme would well befit the laureate of England at the best moments of his inspiration. In figures beyond my prosaic conception, he would describe a scene which cannot be paralleled on the globe. For an unpoetical man like myself, it is difficult to get hold of similes which would enable the reader to picture the scene in his mind. A writer of a military turn of fancy might say that it was the sublimest battle-scene ever enacted on earth; that ten thousand Titans were essaying to breach heaven with a thousand mortars, each charged with a small red-hot hill.. It might look like that not only to General Grant or Sherman, but even to men who never wore a sword. There was an embattled amphitheatre of twenty miles span ridged to the purple clouds. Planted at artillery intervals on this encircling ridge, and at musket-shot spaces in the dark valley between, a thousand batteries, mounted with huge ordnance, white at the mouth with the fury of the bombardment, were pouring their cross-fires of shot and shell into the cloud-works of the lower heavens. Wolverhampton, on the extreme left, stood by her black mortars which shot their red volleys into the night. Coseley and Bilston and Wednesbury replied bomb for bomb, and set the clouds on fire above with their