which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns
and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body.
The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the
limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was the
railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of
April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a
clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous
action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless
courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight of
for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know for
a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden with
truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always for the
last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of our
armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their
own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the
tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned
like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;
now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And
this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another
singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We
may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a
week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would
have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
organized.

"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
Thou only teachest all that man can be!"