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and show that all that engages you is what happens to men's bodies.”
When the war itself comes he writes: “The Divine order pays the country for the sacrifices it has made, and makes, in the war. War ennobles the country; searches it; fires it; acquaints it with its resources; turns it away from false alliances, vain hopes, and theatric attitude; puts it on its mettle — in ourselves our safety must be sought; gives it scope and object; concentrates history into a year; invents means; systematizes everything.
We began the war in vast confusion; when we end it all will be system.”
1 There is nothing in Judge Holmes's oration which goes quite so far as this.
Yet this is the writer whom Matthew Arnold, denying him the name of poet and philosopher, proclaimed as “the friend and comforter of those who would live in the spirit.”
We are left in the conclusion that there are two aspects of everything, and that good comes sometimes of things evil.
Read the one poem which has made Bayard Taylor's name immortal, “A song of the camp,” and consider the peculiar beauty and pathos of
New York, Harper and Brothers, 1897.
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