courageous instincts and loving perceptions, and of self-respect. In our
children rests every hope and promise, and therefore in their mothers.
"Disengage yourselves from parties.... These savage and wolfish parties
alarm me.... Hold yourself judge and master over all of them." Only faith
can save us, the faith in ourselves and in our fellow-men which is of the
true faith in goodness and in God. The idea of the mass of men, so fresh
and free, so loving and so proud, filled this poet with a singular awe.
Passionately he pleads for the dignity of the common people. It is the
average man of a land that is important. To win the people back to a
proud belief and confidence in life, to rapture in this wonderful world,
to love and admiration--this was his burning desire. I demand races of
orbic bards, he rhapsodizes, sweet democratic despots, to dominate and
even destroy. The Future! Vistas! The throes of birth are upon us.
Allons, camarado!

He could not despair. "Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of
the baffled?" he asks himself in "Drum-Taps." But wildest shuttlecock of
criticism though he is, he has never yet been charged with looking only
on the dark side of things. Once, he says, "Once, before the war (alas! I
dare not say how many times the mood has come!), I too, was fill'd with
doubt and gloom." His part in it soothed, mellowed, deepened his great
nature. He had himself witnessed such misery, cruelty, and abomination as
it is best just now, perhaps, not to read about. One fact alone is
enough; that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation
in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had
wrecked his health. During 1862-65 he visited, he says, eighty to a
hundred thousand sick and wounded soldiers, comprehending all, slighting
none. Rebel or compatriot, it made no difference. "I loved the young
man," he cries again and again. Pity and fatherliness were in his face,
for his heart was full of them. Mr. Gosse has described "the old Gray" as