em, with good romantic spirit, even.

But this is a most hollow cheat which Sir Walter Scott and other
book-men have played off on some weak-headed young men of our low-minded
generation. There is no doubt but a man seated amongst ten thousand
cavalry, who shake the earth as they charge, ought to feel himself
swell, as part of an avalanche or mighty Niagara,--as part of the
mightiest visible force which feeble man can enter or his spirit
commingle with. This were no contemptible joy, which the thin-blooded
philosopher might laugh at,--better, indeed, than most to be found here
on this fog-rounded flat of ours, where some few melodies from heaven
and countless blasts from hell meet, and make such strange, unequal
dissonance. But, alack! alack! it is not for the feeble, or the young
soldier, fresh from his plough or his yardstick, his briefs or his
pestle. For how shall we who have all our lives been standing guard
against the approach of death, who start horror-shaken from the dropping
of a tile, whose small wounds are quickly bound up by tender mother or
sister, and lamented over,--how shall we feel romantic in the midst of a
shower of bullets? Enough done, if our vanity or sense of duty hold us
there in any spirit, so that we do the needed trigger-work, and not turn
tail and disgrace ourselves. Even the veteran's satisfaction, since the
laying aside of steel armor, is not much, to be sure, or is gathered
after the battle. There is some savage ecstasy, perhaps, when he sees
his enemy fall, or when he sees his back; this last, indeed, a glorious
sight for any soldier,--worth rushing at the cannon's mouth to look
at, almost. But the man, be he veteran or other, who tells me he found
pleasure on the field where the Minie-balls kill afar off, in cold
blood,--I know him for one of the eccentric, stupid, or talkers for
purposes of vanity.--But this will suffice.

There were three places on the road, amongst the Cordillera ridges,
where, in former wars, a Costa-Rican force, flying before the
filibusters, had stopped to barricade, and gathered heart to withstand
their pursuers awhile,--long enough to bark the surrounding trees with
musket-shot,--some of them, indeed, amid their topmost branches; for it
is a greaser-failing to shoot inordinately high. Each of these sites we
approached with caution, expecting to see an enemy there; but there was
none, and we came down safely at length to our old shed-camp. Here we
halted, and ma