Again the Rebel answer came,
  Muffled and slow, as if in shame,—­
  “All, all is lost!” in smoke and flame.

  Now bold and strong and stern as Fate
  The Union guns sound forth, “We wait!”
  Faint comes the distant cry, “Too late!”

  “Return! return!” our cannon said;
  And, as the smoke rolled overhead,
  “We dare not!” was the answer dread.

  Then came a sound, both loud and clear,
  A godlike word of hope and cheer,—­
  “Forgiveness!” echoed far and near;

  As when beside some death-bed still
  We watch, and wait God’s solemn will,
  A blue-bird warbles his soft trill.

  I clenched my teeth at that blest word,
  And, angry, muttered, “Not so, Lord! 
  The only answer is the sword!”

  I thought of Shiloh’s tainted air,
  Of Richmond’s prisons, foul and bare,
  And murdered heroes, young and fair,—­

  Of block and lash and overseer,
  And dark, mild faces pale with fear,
  Of baying hell-hounds panting near.

  But then the gentle story told
  My childhood, in the days of old,
  Rang out its lessons manifold.

  O prodigal, and lost! arise
  And read the welcome blest that lies
  In a kind Father’s patient eyes!

  Thy elder brother grudges not
  The lost and found should share his lot,
  And wrong in concord be forgot.

  Thus mused I, as the hours went by,
  Till the relieving guard drew nigh,
  And then was challenge and reply.

  And as I hastened back to line,
  It seemed an omen half divine
  That “Concord” was the countersign.

* * * * *

OUR PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENCE.

It is among the possibilities of the future, that, in due course of time, the United States of America shall become to England what England has become to Saxony.  We cannot be sure, it is true, that the mother-country will live, a prosperous and independent kingdom, to see the full maturity of her gigantic offspring.  We have no right to assume it as a matter of course, that the Western Autocracy will fill up, unbroken, the outline traced for it by Nature and history.  But England, forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest, has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to become, according to the prediction of the London “Times,” the master-power of the planet.

The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted in its recollections. Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad auras,—­if we may invert the poet’s words.  An American millionnaire may be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the end of the twentieth century.  The royal astrologers have cast the horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of Leo.