objectively, as the dear Teutonic philosophers say, and merely as an exhibition of phenomena, I cannot imagine any other issue.  Everything else may happen.  This alone must happen.

“But after all this isn’t a war.  It is a revolution.  It is n’t strategists that are wanted so much as believers.  In revolutions the men who win are those who are in earnest.  Jeff and Stonewall and the other Devil-worshippers are in earnest, but it was not written in the book of fate that the slaveholders’ rebellion should be vanquished by a pro-slavery general.  History is never so illogical.  No, the coming ‘man on horseback’ on our side must be a great strategist, with the soul of that insane lion, mad old John Brown, in his belly.  That is your only Promethean recipe:—­

                         ’et insani leonis
               Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.’

     “I don’t know why Horace runs so in my head this morning. . . .

“There will be work enough for all; but I feel awfully fidgety just now about Port Royal and Hilton Head, and about affairs generally for the next three months.  After that iron-clads and the new levies must make us invincible.”

In another letter, dated November 2, 1862, he expresses himself very warmly about his disappointment in the attitude of many of his old English friends with reference to our civil conflict.  He had recently heard the details of the death of “the noble Wilder Dwight.”

“It is unnecessary,” he says, “to say how deeply we were moved.  I had the pleasure of knowing him well, and I always appreciated his energy, his manliness, and his intelligent cheerful heroism.  I look back upon him now as a kind of heroic type of what a young New Englander ought to be and was.  I tell you that one of these days—­ after a generation of mankind has passed away—­these youths will take their places in our history, and be regarded by the young men and women now unborn with the admiration which the Philip Sidneys and the Max Piccolominis now inspire.  After all, what was your Chevy Chace to stir blood with like a trumpet?  What noble principle, what deathless interest, was there at stake?  Nothing but a bloody fight between a lot of noble gamekeepers on one side and of noble poachers on the other.  And because they fought well and hacked each other to pieces like devils, they have been heroes for centuries.”

The letter was written in a very excited state of feeling, and runs over with passionate love of country and indignation at the want of sympathy with the cause of freedom which he had found in quarters where he had not expected such coldness or hostile tendencies.

From a letter dated Vienna, September 22, 1863.