The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864

We have been patiently counting out this costly currency for three slow years. I pity the moral outlook of the man who does not see that we have received largely of our purchase.

From a nation whom the world believed, and whom itself believed, to be sunk in hopeless mammon worship, we have risen to be a nation that pours out its wealth like water for a noble purpose. Never again will 'the almighty dollar' be called America's divinity. We were sinking fast to low aims and selfish purposes, and wise men groaned at national degeneracy. The summons came, and millions leaped to offer all they had, to fling fortune, limb, and life on the altar of an unselfish cause. The dead manhood of the nation sprang to life at the call. We proved the redness of the old faithful, manly blood, to be as bright as ever.

I know we hear men talk of the demoralization produced by war. There is a great deal they can say eloquently on that side. Drunkenness, licentiousness, lawlessness, they say are produced by it, already to an extent fearful to consider. And scoundrels are using the land's necessities for their own selfish purposes, and fattening on its blood. These things are all true, and a great deal more of the same sort beside. And it may be well at times, with good purpose, to consider them. But it is not well to consider them alone, and speak of them as the only moral results of the war. No! by the ten thousands who have died for the grand idea of National Unity, by the unselfish heroes who have thrown themselves, a living wall, before the parricidal hands of traitors, who have perished that the land they loved beyond life might not perish, by the example and the memory they have left in ten thousand homes, which their death has consecrated for the nation's reverence by their lives and deaths, we protest against the one-sided view that looks only on the moral evil of the struggle!

The truth is, there are war vices and war virtues. There are peace vices and there are peace virtues. Decorous quiet, orderly habits, sober conduct, attention to business, these are the good things demanded by society in peace. And they may consist with meanness, selfishness, cowardice, and utter unmanliness. The round-stomached, prosperous man, with his ships, shops, and factories, is very anxious for the cultivation of these virtues. He does not like to be disturbed o' nights. He wants his street to be quiet and orderly. He wants to be left undisturbed to prosecute his prosperous business. He measures virtue by the aid it offers for that end. Peace vices, the cankers that gnaw a nation's heart, greed, self-seeking luxury, epicurean self-indulgence, hardness to growing ignorance, want, and suffering, indifference to all high purposes, spiritual coma and deadness, these do not disturb him. They are rotting the nation to its marrow, but they do not stand in the way of his money-getting. He never thinks of them as evils at all. To be sure, sometimes, across his torpid brain and heart may echo some harsh expressions, from those stern old Hebrew prophets, about these things. But he has a very comfortable pew, in a very soporific church, and he is only half awake, and the echo dies away and leaves no sign. He is just the man to tell us all about the demoralization of war.

Now quietness and good order, sober, discreet, self-seeking, decorous epicureanism and the rest, are not precisely the virtues that will save a people. There are certain old foundation virtues of another kind, which are the only safe substratum for national or personal salvation. These are courage—hard, muscular, manly courage—fortitude, patience, obedience to discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, veracity of purpose, and such like. These rough old virtues must lie at the base of all right character. You may add, as ornaments to your edifice, as frieze, cornices, and capitals to the pillars, refinements, and courtesies, and gentleness, and so on. But the foundation must rest on the rude granite blocks we have mentioned, or your gingerbread erection will go down in the first storm.

And the simple fact is that peace has a tendency to eat out just these foundation virtues. They are war virtues; just the things called out by a life-and-death battle for some good cause. In these virtues we claim the land has grown. The national character has deepened and intensified in these. We have strengthened anew these rocky foundations of a nation's greatness. Men lapped in luxury have patiently bowed to toil and weariness. Men living in self-indulgence have shaken off their sloth, and roused the old slumbering fearlessness of their race. Men, living for selfish ends, have been penetrated by the light of a great purpose, and have risen to the loftiness of human duty. Men, who shrank from pain as the sorest evil, have voluntarily accepted pain, and borne it with a fortitude we once believed lost from among mankind; and, over all, the flaming light of a worthy cause that men might worthily live for and worthily die for, has led the thousands of the land out of their narrow lives, and low endeavors, to the clear mountain heights of sacrifice! We stand now, a courageous, patient, steadfast, unselfish people before all the world. We stand, a people that has taken its life in its hand for a purely unselfish cause. We have won our place in the foremost rank of nations, not on our wealth, our numbers, or our prosperity, but on the truer test of our manhood, truth, and steadfastness. We stand justified at the bar of our own conscience, for national pride and self-reliance, as we shall infallibly be justified at the bar of the world.

Is this lifting up of a great people nothing? Is this placing of twenty millions on the clear ground of unselfish duty, as life's motive, nothing? Is there one of us, to-day, who is not prouder of his nation and its character, in the midst of its desperate tug for life, than he ever was in the day of its envied prosperity? And when he considers how the nation has answered to its hard necessity, how it has borne itself in its sore trial, is he not clear of all doubt about its vitality and continuance? And is that, also, nothing?

But besides this education in the stern, rude, heroic virtues that prop a people's life, there has been an education in some others, which, though apparently opposed, are really kindred. Unselfish courage is noble, but always with the highest courage there lives a great pity and tenderness. The brave man is always soft hearted. The most courageous people are the tenderest people. The highest manhood dwells with the highest womanhood.

So the heart of the nation has been touched and softened, while its muscles have been steeled. While it has grasped the sword, it has grasped it weeping in infinite pity. It has recognized the truth of human brotherhood as it never did before. All ranks have been drawn together in mutual sympathy. All barriers, that hedge brethren apart, have been broken down in the common suffering.

News comes, to-day, that a great battle has been fought, and wounded thousands of our brothers need aid and care. You tell the news in any city or hamlet in the land, and hands are opened, purses emptied, stores ransacked for comforts for the suffering, and gentle women, in hundreds, are ready to tend them as they would their own. Is this no gain? Is it nothing that the selfishness of us all has been broken up as by an earthquake, and that kindness, charity, and pity to the sick and needy have become the law of our lives? Count the millions that have streamed forth from a people whose heart has been touched by a common suffering, in kindness to wounded and sick soldiers and to their needy families! Benevolence has become the atmosphere of the land.

Four years ago we could not have believed it. That the voluntary charity of Americans would count by millions yearly, would flow out in a steady, deep, increasing tide, that giving would be the rule, free, glad giving, and refusing the marked exception, the world would not have believed it, we would not have believed it ourselves. Is this nothing?

We will think more of each other also for all this. We will love and honor each other better. Under the awful pressure of the Hand that lies upon us so heavily, we are brought into closer knowledge and closer sympathy. The blows of battle are welding us into one. Fragments of all people, and all races, cast here by the waves, and strangers to each other, with a hundred repulsions and separations, even to language, religions, and morals, the furnace heat of our trial is fusing all parts into one strong, united whole. We are driven and drawn together by the sore need that is upon us, and as Americans are forgetting all else. The civil war is making us a people—the American People. We are no longer 'the loose sweepings of all lands,' as they called us. We are one, now, brethren all in the sacrament of a great sorrow.

And is this nothing?

And these goods and gains are permanent. They do not belong to this generation only, or to this time exclusively. After all, the nation is mainly an educator. These things remain, as parts of its moral influence in moulding and training. And here is their infinite value. Independence, courage, patience, fortitude, nobleness, self-sacrifice, and tenderness become the national ethics. These things are pressed home on all growing minds. Coming generations are to be educated in these, by the example of the present. We are stamping these things, as the essentials of the national character, on the ages to come.

A thousand years of prosperity will have no power of this kind. What is there in Chinese history to elevate a Chinaman? What high, heroic experience to educate him, in her long centuries of ignoble peace? The training power of a nation is acquired always in the crises of its history. In the day when it rises to fight for its life, the typal men, who give it the lasting models of its excellence, spring forth too for recognition. The examples of these days of our own crisis will remain forever to influence the children of our people. We may be thankful, in our deepest sorrow, that we are leaving them no example of cowardice or meanness, that we give them a record to read of the courage, endurance, and manliness of the men that begat them, that the stamp of national character we leave to teach them is one of which a brave, free people need never be ashamed, that, in the troubles they may be called to face, we leave them, as the national and tried cure for all troubles, the bold, true heart, the willing hand, the strong arm, and faith in the Lord of Hosts. Shiloh, Stone River, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness, and a hundred others, are the heroic names that will educate our grandchildren, as Bunker Hill, Yorktown, and Saratoga have educated ourselves. Who will say that a heritage of heroism and truth and loyalty like this, to leave to the land we love, is nothing? Who can count the price that will sum its value?

Here, at least, are some of the gains of our civil war. We seek not to penetrate the councils of the Omniscient, or guess His purposes, though we may humbly hope there are vaster things than these in store for humanity and the world as the results of the struggle. Believing that He governs still, that He reigns on the James, as He reigned on the Jordan, that He decides the end, and not President Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, and not General Grant or General Lee, we have firm faith that this awful struggle is no brute fight of beasts or ruffians, but a grand world's war of heroes. We believe He will justify His government in the end, and make this struggle praise Him, in the blessed days that are to come. But we leave all those dim results unguessed at, as we leave the purposes of the war itself unmentioned, and the ends which justify us in fighting on. Men, by this time, have made up their minds, once for all, on these last points. The nation has chosen, and in its own conscience, let others think as they may, accepts the responsibility cheerfully.

It is enough to indicate, as we have done, some real, though immaterial, results already attained, results which, to the philosopher or thoughtful statesman, are worth a very large outlay. They do not, indeed, remove the horror of war, they do not ask us not to seek peace, they do not dry the tears, or hide the blood of the contest, but they do show us that war is no unmixed evil, that even honest, faithful war-work is acceptable work, and will be paid for.

They declare that, after all, war is a means of moral training, that 'Carnage' may be, as the gentlest of poets wrote, 'God's daughter,' that battles may be blessings to be thankful for in the long march of time. They bring to our consciousness, once more, the fact that a Great Battle, amid all its horror, wrath, and blood, is something sacred still, an earthly shadow of that Unseen Battle which has stormed through time, between the hosts of Light and Darkness. They declare again, to the nation, that old truth, without which the nation perishes and man rots, that to die in some good cause is the noblest thing a man can do on earth. They bid us bend in hope beneath the awful hand of the God of Battles, and do our appointed work patiently, bravely, loyally, till He brings the end. They tell us that not work only, but heroic fighting, also, is a worship accepted at His seat. They bid us be thankful, as for the most sacred of all gifts, that thousands, in this loyal land of ours, have had the high grace, given from above,

'To search through all they felt and saw,The springs of life, the depths of awe,And reach the law within the law:'To pass, when Life her light withdraws,Not void of righteous self-applause,Nor in a merely selfish cause—'In some good cause, not in their own,To perish, wept for, honored, known,And like a warrior overthrown.'

PROVERBS

Violets and lilies-of-the-valley are seen in a vale.

Family jars should be filled with honey.

All are not lambs that gambol on the green.

Ask the 'whys,' and be wise.

THE UNDIVINE COMEDY—A POLISH DRAMA

Dedicated to Mary

PART II

'Du Gemisch von Koth und Feuer!'

'Thou compound of clay and fire!'

Why, O child! art thou not, like other children, riding gayly about on sticks for horses, playing with toys, torturing flies, or impaling butterflies on pins, that the brilliant circles of their dying pangs may amuse thy young soul? Why dost thou never romp and sport upon the grassy turf, pilfer sugarplums and sweetmeats, and wet the letters of thy picture book from A to Z with sudden tears?

Infant king of flies, moths, and grasshoppers; of cowslips, daisies, and of kingcups; of tops, hoops, and kites; little friend of Punch and puppets; robber of birds' nests, and outlaw of petty mischiefs—son of the poet, tell me, why art thou so unlike a child—so like an angel?

What strange meaning lies in the blue depths of thy dreamy eyes? Why do they seek the ground as if weighed down by the shadows of their drooping lashes; and why is their latent fire so gloomed by mournful memories, although they have only watched the early violets of a few springs? Why sinks thy broad head heavily down upon thy tiny hands, while thy pallid temples bend under the weight of thine infant thoughts, like snowdrops burdened with the dew of night?

And when thy pale cheek floods with sudden crimson, and, tossing back thy golden curls, thou gazest sadly into the depths of the sky—tell me, infant, what seest thou there, and with whom holdest thou communion? For then the light and subtile wrinkles weave their living mesh across thy spotless brow, like silken threads untwining by an unseen power from viewless coils, and thine eyes sparkle, freighted with mystic meanings, which none are able to interpret! Then thy grandam calls in vain, 'George, George!' and weeps, for thou heedest her not, and she fears thou dost not love her! Friends and relations then appeal to thee in vain, for thou seemest not to hear or know them! Thy father is silent and looks sad; tears fill his anxious eyes, falling coldly back into his troubled heart.

The physician comes, puts his finger on thy pulse, counts its changeful beats, and says thy nerves are out of order.

Thy old godfather brings thee sugarplums, strokes thy pale cheeks, and tells thee thou must be a statesman in thy native land.

The professor passes his hand over thy broad brow, and declares thou will have talent for the abstract sciences.

The beggar, whom thou never passest without casting a coin in his tattered hat, promises thee a beautiful wife, and a heavenly crown.

The soldier, raising thee high in the air, declares thou wilt yet be a great general.

The wandering gypsy looks into thy tender face, traces the lines upon thy little hand, but will not tell their hidden meaning; she gazes sadly on thee, and then sighing turns away; she says nothing, and refuses to take the proffered coin.

The magnetizer makes his passes over thee, presses his fingers on thine eyes, and circles thy face, but mutters suddenly an oath, for he is himself growing sleepy; he feels like kneeling down before thee, as before a holy image. Then thou growest angry, and stampest with thy tiny feet; and when thy father comes, thou seemest to him a little Lucifer; and in his picture of the Day of Judgment, he paints thee thus among the infant demons, the young spirits of evil.

Meanwhile thou growest apace, becoming ever more and more beautiful, not in the childish beauty of rose bloom and snow, but in the loveliness of wondrous and mysterious thoughts, which flow to thee from other worlds; and though thy languid eyes droop wearily their fringes, though thy cheek is pale, and thy breast bent and contracted, yet all who meet thee stop to gaze, exclaiming: 'What a little angel!'

If the dying flowers had a living soul inspired from heaven; if, in place of dewdrops, each drooping leaf were bent to earth with the thought of an angel, such flowers would resemble thee, fair child!

And thus, before the fall, they may, perchance, have bloomed in Paradise!

A graveyard. The Man and George are seen sitting by a grave, over which stands a gothic monument, with arches, pillars, and mimic towers.

The Man. Take off thy hat, George, kneel, and pray for thy mother's soul!

George. Hail, Mary, full of grace! Mary, Queen of Heaven, Lady of all that blooms on earth, that scents the fields, that paints the fringes of the streams …

The Man. Why changest thou the words of the prayer? Pray for thy mother as thou hast been taught to do; for thy dear mother, George, who perished in her youth, just ten years ago this very day and hour.

George. Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee! I know that thou art blessed among the angels, and as thou glidest softly through them, each one plucks a rainbow from his wings to cast under thy feet, and thou floatest softly on upon them as if borne by waves....

The Man. George!

George. Be not angry with me, father! these words force themselves into my mind; they pain me so dreadfully in my head, that I must say them....

The Man. Rise, George. Such prayers will never reach God!

Thou art not thinking of thy mother; thou dost not love her!

George. I love her. I see mamma very often.

The Man. Where, my son?

George. In dreams—yet not exactly in dreams, but just as I am going to sleep. I saw her yesterday.

The Man. What do you mean, George?

George. She looked so pale and thin!

The Man. Has she ever spoken to you, darling?

George. She goes wandering up and down—through an immense Dark—she roams about entirely alone, so white and so pale! She sang to me yesterday. I will tell thee the words of her song:

'I wander through the universe,I search through infinite space,I press through Chaos, Darkness,To bring thee light and grace;I listen to the angels' songTo catch the heavenly tone;Seek every form of beauty,To bring to thee, mine own!'I seek from greatest spirits,From those of lower might,Rainbow colors, depth of shadow,Burning contrasts, dark and bright;Rhythmed music, hues from Eden,Floating through the heavenly bars;Sages' wisdom, seraphs' loving,Mystic glories from the stars—That thou mayst be a Poet, richly gifted from aboveTo win thy father's fiery heart, and keep his changeful love!'

Thou seest, dear father, that my mother does speak to me, and that I remember, word for word, what she says to me; indeed I am telling you no lie.

The Man (leaning against one of the pillars of the tomb). Mary! wilt thou destroy thine own son, and burden my Soul with the ruin of both?…

But what folly! She is calm and tranquil now in heaven, as she was pure and sweet on earth. My poor boy only dreams …

George. I hear mamma's voice now, father!

The Man. From whence comes it, my son?

George. From between the two elms before us glittering in the sunset. Listen!

'I pour through thy spiritMusic and might;I wreathe thy pale foreheadWith halos of light;Though blind, I can show theeBlest forms from above,Floating far through the spacesOf infinite love,Which the angels in heaven and men on the earthCall Beauty. I've sought since the day of thy birthTo waken thy spirit,My darling, my own,That the hopes of thy fatherMay rest on his son!That his love, warm and glowing,Unchanging may shine;And his heart, infant poet,Forever be thine!'

The Man. Can a blessed spirit be mad? Do the last thoughts of the dying pursue them into their eternal homes?

Can insanity be a part of immortality?… O Mary! Mary!

George. Mamma's voice is growing weaker and weaker; it is dying away now close by the wall of the charnel house. Hark! hark! she is still repeating:

'That his love, warm and glowing,Unchanging may shine;And his heart, little poet,Forever be thine!'

The Man. O God! have mercy upon our unfortunate child, whom in Thine anger Thou hast doomed to madness and to an early death! Have pity on the innocent creature Thou hast Thyself called into being! Rob him not of reason! Ruin not the living temple Thou hast built—the shrine of the soul! Oh look down upon my agony, and deliver not this young angel up to hell! Me Thou hast at least armed with strength to endure the dizzying throng of thoughts, passions, longings, yearnings—but him! Thou hast given him a frame fragile as the frailest web of the spider, and every great thought rends and frays it. O Lord! my God! have mercy!

I have not had one tranquil hour for the last ten years. Thou hast placed me among men who may have envied my position, who may have wished me well, or who would have conferred benefits upon me—but I have been alone! alone!

Thou hast sent storms of agony upon me, mingled with wrongs, dreams, hopes, thoughts, aspirations, and yearnings for the infinite! Thy grace shines upon my intellect, but reaches not my heart!

Have mercy, God! Suffer me to love my son in peace, that thus reconciliation may be planted between the created and the Creator!…

Cross thyself now, my son, and come with me.

Eternal rest be with the dead!

Exit with George

A public square. Ladies and gentlemen. A Philosophe. The Man.

Philosophe. I repeat to you, that it is my irresistible conviction that the hour has come for the emancipation of negroes and women.

The Man. I agree with you fully.

Philosophe. And as a change so great in the constitution of society, both in general and particular, stands so immediately before us, I deduce from such a revolution the complete destruction of old forms and formulas, and the regeneration of the whole human family.

The Man. Do you really think so?

Philosophe. Just as our earth, by a sudden change in the inclination of its axis, might rotate more obliquely …

The Man. Do you see this hollow tree?

Philosophe. With tufts of new leaves sprouting forth from the lower branches?

The Man. Yes. How much longer do you think it can continue to stand?

Philosophe. I cannot tell; perhaps a year or two longer.

The Man. Its roots are rapidly rotting out, and yet it still puts forth a few green leaves.

Philosophe. What inference do you deduce from that?

The Man. Nothing—only that it is rotting out in spite of its few green leaves; falling daily into dust and ashes; and that it will not bear the tool of the moulder!

And yet it is your type, the type of your followers, of your theories, of the times in which we live....