Thet tells the story! Thet 's wut we shall git
By tryin' squirtguns on the burnin' Pit;
For the day never comes when it 'll du
To kick off Dooty like a worn-out shoe.
I seem to hear a whisperin' in the air,
A sighin' like, of unconsoled despair,
Thet comes from nowhere an' from everywhere,
An' seems to say, "Why died we? war n't it, then,
To settle, once for all, thet men wuz men?
O, airth's sweet cup snetched from us barely tasted,
The grave's real chill is feelin' life wuz wasted!
O, you we lef, long-lingerin' et the door,
Lovin' you best, coz we loved Her the more,
Thet Death, not we, had conquered, we should feel
Ef she upon our memory turned her heel,
An' unregretful throwed us all away
To flaunt it in a Blind Man's Holiday!"
My frien's, I 've talked nigh on to long enough.
I hain't no call to bore ye coz ye 're tough;
My lungs are sound, an' our own v'ice delights
Our ears, but even kebbigeheads hez rights.
It 's the las' time thet I shell e'er address ye,
But you 'll soon fin' some new tormentor: bless ye!
QUESTION OF MONUMENTS.
In the beautiful life which the English-speaking foreigners lead at Rome, the great sensations are purely æsthetic. To people who know one another so familiarly as must the members of a community united in a strange land by the ties of alien race, language, and religion, there cannot, of course, be wanting the little excitements of personal gossip and scandal; but even these have generally an innocent, artistic flavor, and it is ladies' statues, not reputations, which suffer,—gentlemen's pictures, not characters, which are called into question; while the events which interest the whole community are altogether different from those which move us at home. In the Capital of the Past, people meeting at the café, or at the tea-tables of lady-acquaintance, speak, before falling upon the works of absent friends, concerning the antique jewel which Castellani lately bought of a peasant, and intends to reproduce, for the delight of all who can afford to love the quaint and exquisite forms of the ancient workers in gems and gold; or they talk of that famous statue of the young Hercules, dug up by the lucky proprietor, who received from the Pope a marquisate, and forgiveness of all his debts, in return for his gift of the gilded treasure. At the worst these happy children of art, and their cousins the connoisseurs, (every English-speaking foreigner in Rome is of one class or the other,) are only drawn from the debate of such themes by some dramatic aspect of the picturesque Roman politics: a scene between the French commandant and Antonelli, or the arrest of a restaurateur for giving his guests white turnips, red beets, and green beans in the same revolutionary plate; or the like incident.
At home, here, in the multiplicity of our rude affairs, by what widely different events and topics are we excited to talk! It must be some occurrence of very terrible, vile, or grotesque effect that can take our minds from our business. We discuss the ghastly particulars of a steamboat explosion, or the evidence in a trial for murder; or if the chief magistrate addresses his fellow-citizens in his colloquial, yet dignified way, we dispute whether he was not, at the time of the speech, a martyr to those life-long habits of abstinence from which he is known to have once suffered calamities spared the confirmed wine-bibber. Once, indeed, we seemed as a nation to rise to the appreciation of those beautiful interests which occupy our Roman friends, and once, not a great while ago, we may be said to have known an æsthetic sensation. For the first time in our history as a people, we seemed to feel the necessity of art, and to regard it as a living interest, like commerce, or manufacturing, or mining, when, shortly after the close of the war, and succeeding the fall of the last and greatest of its dead, the country expressed a universal desire to commemorate its heroes by the aid of art. But we do not husband our sensations as our Roman friends do theirs: the young Hercules lasted them two months, while a divorce case hardly satisfies us as many days, and a railroad accident not longer. We hasten from one event to another, and it would be hard to tell now whether it was a collision on the Saint Jo line, or a hundred and thirty lives lost on the Mississippi, or some pleasantry from our merry Andrew, which distracted the public mind from the subject of monumental honors. It is certain, however, that, at the time alluded to, there was much talk of such things in the newspapers and in the meetings. A popular subscription was opened for the erection of a monument to Abraham Lincoln at his home in Springfield; each city was about to celebrate him by a statue in its public square; every village would have his bust or a funeral tablet; and our soldiers were to be paid the like reverence and homage. Then the whole affair was overwhelmed by some wave of novel excitement, and passed out of the thoughts of the people; so that we feel, in recurring to it now, like him who, at dinner, turns awkwardly back to a subject from which the conversation has gracefully wandered, saying, "We were speaking just now about"—something the company has already forgotten. So far as we have learned, not an order for any memorial sculpture of Lincoln has been given in the whole country, and we believe that only one design by an American sculptor has been offered for the Springfield monument. There is time, however, to multiply designs; for the subscription, having reached a scant fifty thousand dollars, rests at that sum, and rises no higher.
But we hope that the people will not altogether relinquish the purpose of monumental commemoration of the war, and we are not wholly inclined to lament that the fever-heat of their first intent exhausted itself in dreams of shafts and obelisks, groups and statues, which would probably have borne as much relation to the real idea of Lincoln's life, and the war and time which his memory embodies and represents, as the poetry of the war has borne. In the cool moments of our convalescence from civil disorder, may we not think a little more clearly, and choose rather more wisely than would have been possible earlier?
No doubt there is in every epoch a master-feeling which art must obey, if it would flourish, and remain to represent something intelligible after the epoch is past. We know by the Gothic churches of Italy how mightily the whole people of that land were once moved by the impulses of their religion (which might be, and certainly was, a thing very different from purity and goodness): the Renaissance temples remind us of a studious period passionately enamored of the classic past; in the rococo architecture and sculpture of a later time, we have the idle swagger, the unmeaning splendor, the lawless luxury, of an age corrupted by its own opulence, and proud of its licentious slavery. Had anything come of the æsthetic sensation immediately following the war, and the spirit of martial pride with which it was so largely mixed, we should probably have had a much greater standing-army in bronze and marble than would have been needed for the suppression of any future rebellion. An excitement, a tumult, not a tendency of our civilization, would thus have been perpetuated, to misrepresent us and our age to posterity; for we are not a military people, (though we certainly know how to fight upon occasion,) and the pride which we felt in our army as a body, and in the men merely as soldiers, was an exultation which has already in a great part subsided. Indeed, the brave fellows have themselves meantime given us a lesson, in the haste they have made to put off their soldier-costume and resume the free and individual dress of the civilian. The ignorant poets might pipe of the glory and splendor of war, but these men had seen the laurel growing on the battle-field, and knew
"Di che lagrime grondi e di che sangue"