those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into each other
like the joints of a pocket-telescope. When the young men from Middlesex
dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the
other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always been the mint in
which the world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or
month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that the first impression
bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face
hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields are alike in their
main features. The young fellows who fell in our earlier struggle seemed
like old men to us until within these few months; now we remember they
were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they go to the fight; it
seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was crimsoned but yesterday,
and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-tower would feel warm, if we
laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are
but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the
field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right
against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a movement
onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its
mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we
think. Our bullets and cannonballs have lengthened into bolts like those
which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons,
such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly
invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we
trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness,
our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better,