Page:War and its Heroes.djvu/10



"The living and the dead are here!" We ask ourselves in vain how many of those whose immortality await fruition in the touch of death will have taken their places in the halls of the Eternal ere the concluding volumes of our work are given to the world. Hope, with its golden veil, hides from as all save the smiles of the Future. But we have seen the Past, and are familiar with its characteristics. Our soldiers are brave. That courage which defends, that heroism which dares, that fire of soul which burns a path of fury through a sea of terrors, stand recorded over their unnumbered graves and glisten in the memorial light of their tattered flags. In this Revolution all are heroes. Each leader is not only a representative, but an impersonation. His heart is the heart of the Army. The sympathy is sublime—it than love—it is almost adoration! That vast and terrible aggregation of armed men which suddenly leaped from the bosom of the South, early in the Spring of 1861, was no pulseless, cold and mere obedient machine. Its firm and regular tread, as it massed on the bristling borders of the North, or moved in stately columns along the shadowless wastes "down by the sounding sea," was not the step of a "standing army." That monstrous accumulation of human puppets fell to the fortune of the enemy. The animus of independence gathered its propelling force in every breast of the great uprising mass of Southern patriots, and sent them, with resistless momentum, forward, everywhere, to the field of danger. There was no impediment in space—no quiver in the speeding nerve. They shot from point to point like comets, sweeping along the surface of the earth.

This will be known in the future as the spirit of '61. Then came Sumter, and Bethel, and Manassas. The tufted green of patriarchal pines that had peacefully nodded in the winds of eighty summers; the slopes of verdure on whose cushioned surface had shone for many a year the starry tracks of angels, over which the bee and fairy butterfly swam, in the fragrant, sunny air; the weird and perfumed thicket, and the dell, mossy and shadowy and secluded; and the innumerable fields of laughing grain; and the haunted solitudes and romance-breathing streams—threw off their sweet immaculate illusions, and breathed the sulphurous atmosphere of War. Peace, that hung in haloes around the flashing, umencrimsoned bayonets of our hero-legions; Peace, that whispered in the music of the sea and stayed the crash of the yet impending conflict; Peace, that stole its silvery way along the eve of battle, and smiled, transfigured, in the dawn of victory, fled. A star had fallen, and it was the star of. It fell among the visions of the past. The summer and the winter rolled away, grim with death, but bright with triumph