the loom, as they stood in the midst of the hottest fire at the Bull’s Run. There stood and fought two score of volunteers from a village in Massachusetts,—stood and fought for nine hours, in heat and hunger, and amidst the natural terrors of a first battle. They may have been among the unsoldierly fellows who ate up two days’ rations in one, and finished their allowance of water, and had thought proper to run to the streams and drink on the march. They may have been to blame for their hunger and thirst. For aught I know they may have criticised their officers en route, and laid the blame since the defeat where they fancied it ought to rest. But they also fought like men each of whom felt himself a champion of the injured negro race, and a patriot pledged to the recovery of the constitution. One was a stout working man, who had run for hours, at the end of his day’s toil, getting signatures to petitions to the legislature, while it was still time to preclude this war. He will run no more, for he left a leg at the Bull’s Run. Another was a youth of eighteen, whose republican self-will had brought him into the field before he was fit for the fatigue of it. He had been helped when he showed himself immoveable; and the Puritan non-resistant relatives who could not conscientiously give him revolver or rifle, had stocked him with comforts,—with writing materials and canteen “fixings” in the smallest compass and most convenient shape. Here he stayed in the thick of the fight, till his colonel was down, and his captain killed, and the little band he belonged to was ordered to retreat. He could not retreat far, and as he sank he desired his nearest comrade to write to his father, and say that he was unwounded, but unable to go further. He was last seen lying by the wayside, and his name is in the list of the missing. Citizen-soldiers of this character will gain their political objects in their own way, and will make themselves enough of soldiers to take the shortest way. Not the less does it appear that it is not the military spirit that is astir within them, and that their conceptions are essentially political. I think so the more for the very incidents which are told as illustrations of the martial animus. When citizens who have hitherto been backward in action and in speech now propose to kill every white man at the South, in order to settle the two questions at once (of the constitution and of slavery) the notion is essentially unwarlike;—as much so as the officers’ levity of talk about being “whipped,” or the privates’ lounge about the streets of Washington, gossiping about the disgraces of the rout, and criticising the counsel and conduct of their commanders. The whole condition of war is as yet unknown to them; and if they learn it, it will be by express study, with no aid from instinct.
The attitude of the chiefs on either side after the conflict is as strange a spectacle as anything that had gone before. General Beauregard, looking at a newspaper handed to him, and finding in it that he had gained a great victory, of which he had had no suspicion; General Scott in council at Washington, upbraiding himself for giving up his judgment to the dictation of civilians; the Government telegraphing to New York an appeal to a newspaper editor to desist from a particular course of comment; the best citizens declaring themselves glad of a defeat and rout; Confederate soldiers picking off stragglers and sentries, as they would steal a march on wolves; Federal volunteers walking away from their guns, guessing they’ll go home and see how the old woman and the farm get on, and then come back; the whole field of the struggle, and all the details, are so unlike any conception of warfare in Europe as to be worth, as I said at the beginning, a close and patient study.
There is no doubt, I suppose, in anybody’s mind that the Northern men will succeed, in their own way, and after certain delays. All indications point to the humiliation of the Secession faction, if any reliance may be placed on the universal testimony to the poverty of the party, the impressment of a portion of their soldiery, and the discontent of many more; the restless state of the slaves, and the consequent impossibility of recruiting the army; and the increasing manifestation of Unionist opinion in the Slave States.
I anticipate a brave and patient persistence on the part of the Free States, and an ultimate vindication of their republican principles, and emancipation of the negroes. There can now be no stopping short of these two aims. What the form of ultimate settlement will be, and whether the Republic can come out democratic from the ordeal of a civil war, is more than any prudent man will undertake to prophesy.
THE SPRING OF CLEAR WATER.
It was at noon on a sultry summer’s day, that three travellers quitted the high road to seek refreshment at a spring, which they perceived at a short distance. The spring was overhung by a luxuriant growth of shrubs which flourished from its moisture, and in gratitude returned their shade to preserve its refreshing coolness. The waters, collecting first in a basin hollowed in the rock, overflowed in transparent streams, trickling in their course over the following inscription, carved on the rock:
“Be thou like unto this spring.”
The separate streamlets kept joining each other on the coarse sand beneath the basin, and then flowed away, farther and farther, till united into a small rivulet they rippled through the neighbouring flowery meadows. The travellers, having quenched their thirst, while sitting to rest themselves for awhile, read the inscription, of which each gave his own interpretation.
“It is excellent advice,” said one of them, who appeared to be a trader; he carried a knapsack on his back, his broad leathern belt seemed to contain something heavy wrapped or sewed within it, and his strong boots were covered with a layer of dust, seemingly from a long journey. “The spring,” he continued, “runs without ceasing, wanders extensively, receives into itself the waters of other springs, and increases till it becomes a river, and by its example incites man