The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865

A tenderer green than May
The Eternal Season wears,—
The blue of our summer's day
Is dim and pallid to theirs,—
The Horror faded away,
And 'twas heaven all unawares!

Tents on the Infinite Shore!
Flags in the azuline sky,
Sails on the seas once more!
To-day, in the heaven on high,
All under arms once more!

The troops are all in their lines,
The guidons flutter and play;
But every bayonet shines,
For all must march to-day.

What lofty pennons flaunt?
What mighty echoes haunt,
As of great guns, o'er the main?
Hark to the sound again!
The Congress is all-ataunt!
The Cumberland's manned again!

All the ships and their men
Are in line of battle to-day,—
All at quarters, as when
Their last roll thundered away,—
All at their guns, as then,
For the Fleet salutes to-day.

The armies, have broken camp
On the vast and sunny plain,
The drums are rolling again;
With steady, measured tramp,
They're marching all again.

With alignment firm and solemn,
Once again they form
In mighty square and column,—
But never for charge and storm.

The Old Flag they died under
Floats above them on the shore,
And on the great ships yonder
The ensigns dip once more,—
And once again the thunder
Of the thirty guns and four!

In solid platoons of steel,
Under heaven's triumphal arch,
The long lines break and wheel;
And the word is, "Forward, march!"

The colors ripple o'erhead,
The drums roll up to the sky,
And with martial time and tread
The regiments all pass by,—
The ranks of our faithful Dead,
Meeting their President's eye.

With a soldier's quiet pride
They smile o'er the perished pain,
For their anguish was not vain,—
For thee, O Father, we died!
And we did not die in vain.

March on, your last brave mile!
Salute him, Star and Lace,
Form round him, rank and file,
And look on the kind, rough face;
But the quaint and homely smile
Has a glory and a grace
It never had known erewhile,—
Never, in time and space.

Close round him, hearts of pride!
Press near him, side by side,—
Our Father is not alone!
For the Holy Right ye died,
And Christ, the Crucified,
Waits to welcome his own.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Letters to Various Persons, By Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

The prose of Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind. These letters, most of which were addressed to a single confidential friend, give us Thoreau's thoughts in undress, and there has been no previous book in which we came so near him. It is like engraving the studies of an artist,—studies many of which were found too daring or difficult for final execution, and which must be shown in their original shape or not at all. To any one who was more artist than thinker this exhibition would be doing wrong; but to one like Thoreau, more thinker than artist, it is an act of justice.

The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear Mother, … Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the highest and often of the most subtile quality.

Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness, and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look at literature,—how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse at his literary method is very valuable.

One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions of faith seem to show something hackneyed and second-hand. It seems the first resumption—unless here again we must link his name with Emerson's—of that great strain of thought of which Epictetus the slave and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the sovereign were the last previous examples. Amid the general Miserere, here is one hymn of lofty cheer. There is neither weak conceit nor weak contrition, but gratitude for existence, and a sublime aim. "My actual life," he says, "is a fact in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak. Every man's position is, in fact, too simple to be described.... I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that.... I know that I am. I know that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad news." (p. 45.)

"Happy the man," he elsewhere nobly says, "who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to Nature and to God." And then he manfully adds,—"These things I say; other things I do." Manfully, not mournfully; for his life, though in many ways limited, was never, in any high sense, unsuccessful; nor did he ever assume for one moment the attitude of apology.

These limitations of his life no doubt impaired his thought also, in certain directions. The letters might sometimes exhibit the record of Carlyle's lion, attempting to live on chicken-weed. Here is a man of vast digestive power, who, prizing the flavor of whortleberries and wild apples, insists on making these almost his only food. It is amazing to see what nutriment he extracts from them; yet would not, after all, an ampler bill of fare have done better? Is there not something to be got from the caucus and from the opera, which Thoreau abhorred, as well as from the swamps which he justly loved? Could he not have spent two hours rationally in Boston elsewhere than at the station-house of the railway that led to Concord? His habits suggest a perpetual feeling of privation and effort, and he has to be constantly on the alert to repel condolence. This one-sidedness of result is a constant drawback on the reader's enjoyment, and it is impossible to leave it out of sight. Yet all criticism seems like cavilling, when one comes upon a series of sentences like these:—