background a chaotic darkness. Like every obsession, it gnaws at thought,
follows us into our dreams and returns with the morning. But there have
been other wars. And humanity, after learning as best it may their brutal
lesson, has survived them. Just as the young soldier leaves home behind
him and accepts hardship and danger as to the manner born, so, when he
returns again, life will resume its old quiet wont. Nature is not idle
even in the imagination. It is man's salvation to forget no less than it
is his salvation to remember. And it is wise even in the midst of the
conflict to look back on those that are past and to prepare for the
returning problems of the future.

When Whitman wrote his "Democratic Vistas," the long embittered war
between the Northern and Southern States of America was a thing only of
yesterday. It is a headlong amorphous production--a tangled meadow of
"leaves of grass" in prose. But it is as cogent to-day as it was when it
was written:

To the ostent of the senses and eyes [he writes], the influences
which stamp the world's history are wars, uprisings, or downfalls
of dynasties.... These, of course, play their part; yet, it may
be, a single new thought, imagination, abstract principle ... put
in shape by some great literatus, and projected among mankind,
may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the
longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely
political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.

The literatus who realized this had his own message in mind. And yet,
justly. For those who might point to the worldly prosperity and material
comforts of his country, and ask, Are not these better indeed than any
utterances even of greatest rhapsodic, artist, or literatus? he has his