coming war. "Fools that men are!" said he, as he rose from bed and looked
out at the misty stars; "they do not live long enough to know the value
and purport of life, else they would combine together to live long,
instead of throwing away the lives of thousands as they do. And what
matters a little tyranny in so short a life? What matters a form of
government for such ephemeral creatures?"

As morning brightened, these sounds, this clamor,--or something that was in
the air and caused the clamor,--grew so loud that Septimius seemed to feel
it even in his solitude. It was in the atmosphere,--storm, wild
excitement, a coming deed. Men hurried along the usually lonely road in
groups, with weapons in their hands,--the old fowling-piece of seven-foot
barrel, with which the Puritans had shot ducks on the river and Walden
Pond; the heavy harquebus, which perhaps had levelled one of King Philip's
Indians; the old King gun, that blazed away at the French of Louisburg or
Quebec,--hunter, husbandman, all were hurrying each other. It was a good
time, everybody felt, to be alive, a nearer kindred, a closer sympathy
between man and man; a sense of the goodness of the world, of the
sacredness of country, of the excellence of life; and yet its slight
account compared with any truth, any principle; the weighing of the
material and ethereal, and the finding the former not worth considering,
when, nevertheless, it had so much to do with the settlement of the
crisis. The ennobling of brute force; the feeling that it had its godlike
side; the drawing of heroic breath amid the scenes of ordinary life, so
that it seemed as if they had all been transfigured since yesterday. Oh,
high, heroic, tremulous juncture, when man felt himself almost an angel;
on the verge of doing deeds that outwardly look so fiendish! Oh, strange
rapture of the coming battle! We know something of that time now; we that
have seen the muster of the village soldiery on the meeting-house green,
and at railway stations; and heard the drum and fife, and seen the