"Thou solemn month! I hear thy voice,
It tells my soul of other days,
When but to live was to rejoice,
When earth was lovely to my gaze
Oh, visions bright—oh, blessed hours,
Where are their living raptures now?
I ask my spirit's wearied powers,
I ask my pale and fevered brow.
"I look to Nature, and behold
My life's dim emblems rustling round,
In hues of crimson and of gold—
The year's dead honors on the ground.
And sighing with the winds, I feel,
While their low pinions murmur by,
How much their sweeping tones reveal
Of life and human destiny.
"When Spring's delightsome moments shone,
They came in zephyrs from the West:
They bore the wood-lark's melting tone,
They stirred the blue lake's glassy breast
Through Summer, fainting in the heat,
They lingered in the forest shade;
But changed and strengthened now, they beat
In storm, o'er mountain, glen, and glade.
"How like those transports of the heart,
When life is fresh and joy is new;
Soft as the halcyon's downy nest,
And transient all as they are true!
They stir the leaves in that bright wreath
Which Hope about her forehead twines,
Till Grief's hot sighs around it breathe,
Then Pleasure's lip its smile resigns.
"Alas, for Time, and Death, and Care,
What gloom about our way they fling
Like clouds in Autumn's gusty air,
The burial-pageant of the Spring
The dreams that each successive year
Seemed bathed in hues of brighter pride,
At last like withered leaves appear,
And sleep in darkness, side by side!"
[10] Willis Gaylord Clark, for many years Editor of the Philadelphia Daily Gazette, and author of the "Ollapodiana" papers in the Knickerbocker Magazine.
Carlyle, in his "Sartor Resartus," gives a condensed, but exceedingly forcible picture of the "net purport and upshot of war," by taking thirty able-bodied men from a French and English village, and making them face each other on a pleasant morning, when they blow each other's souls out, and straightway become "shells of men." We were speaking of this the other evening with a friend, who was with our army in Mexico, and in the course of much chat, touching war and its accompaniments, he mentioned an anecdote of as brave a fellow as there was in his command, but who had an unfortunate and irresistible habit of occasional intoxication, whenever, by hook or by crook, he could procure a "horn" of brandy or whiskey. One evening, the day after an engagement, in which his coolness and determined bravery had won the admiration and warm commendation of his superior officers, he was brought before his commanding officer, who was on parade, in a state of beastly intoxication. Remembering his services of the day before, the officer was reluctant to punish him, at least without first trying to make him ashamed of his offense by exhortation and remonstrance. "Are you not ashamed of yourself?" he asked, "to be brought before me in this condition?—you that can be so good a soldier? There was not a braver man in the regiment yesterday than you; and now you go and spoil all the honor you acquired, by disobeying orders, and coming before me drunk. Take him away!—I'm ashamed of him!" "Here—hello—hold on!" said the soldier—"hold on a minute: you've rep-rep-ri-manded me some, and praised me a good deal: now look o' here, cap'n, do you expect to buy all the human virtues for seven dollars a month? It's too cheap, cap'n—too cheap!" He probably thought with Lowell's Yankee, writing from Saltillo after his first engagement:
"I wish that I was furder!
Ninepence a day for killin' folks
Comes kind o' low, for murder;
I worked out to slaughterin' some
For Deacon Cephas Billin's,
And in the hardest times there was,
I allers fetch'd ten shillins!"