’But the truth is that here, as elsewhere, poetry has reached the truth, while science and common sense have missed it.  It has distinguished—­as, in spite of all mercenary and feeble sophistry, men ever will distinguish—­war from mere bloodshed.  It has discerned the higher feelings which lie beneath its revolting features.  Carnage is terrible.  The conversion of producers into destroyers is a calamity.  Death, and insults to women worse than death—­and human features obliterated beneath the hoof of the war-horse—­and reeking hospitals, and ruined commerce, and violated homes, and broken hearts—­they are all awful.  But there is something worse than death:  cowardice is worse.  And the decay of enthusiasm and manliness is worse.  And it is worse than death, aye, worse than one hundred thousand deaths, when a people has gravitated down into the creed, that the “wealth of nations” consists, not in generous hearts, “fire in each breast, and freedom on each brow,” in national virtues, and primitive simplicity, and heroic endurance, and preference of duty to life—­not in men, but in silk and cotton, and something that they call “capital.”  Peace is blessed—­peace arising out of charity.  But peace springing out of the calculations of selfishness is not blessed.  If the price to be paid for peace is this, that wealth accumulate and men decay, better far that every street, in every town of our once noble country, should run blood.’[K]

As we write, every telegram proves the vaunted unity of the South a sham, a visionary political bugbear, no longer strong or hideous enough to frighten the most inveterate conservative dough-face.  But a few victories do not end the war; still earnestness and effort and sacrifice, for the sick man of America will fight even when his ’brains are out.’  Not until we have proved to Breckenridge, the traitor, that we are not ‘fighting for principles that three-fourths of us abhor,’ and that the Union is not only ’a means of preserving the principles of political liberty,’ but that in it is irrevocably bound up every living principle of all liberty, social, religious and individual; that in its shelter only we have security against wrong at home and insult from abroad; not until Emancipation has instituted a new order of things in society as well as in politics, will the death of the out-spoken patriot and brave man, Lyon, be avenged, and the Struggle be at an end.  ’Genius is patient,’ but patience has had her perfect work, and the days of Rebellion are numbered.  On with the crusade!

* * * * *

MACCARONI AND CANVAS.

II.