of the Forts" below New Orleans, and
the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the _Bay Fight_. {558}
With some roughness and unevenness of execution, Brownell's poetry had a
fire which places him next to Whittier as the Koerner of the civil war.
In him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the
righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy war
to the crusaders against slavery:

"Full red the furnace fires must glow
That melt the ore of mortal kind:
The mills of God are grinding slow,
But ah, how close they grind!

"To-day the Dahlgren and the drum
Are dread apostles of his name;
His kingdom here can only come
By chrism of blood and flame."

One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Winthrop, hardly
known as a writer until the publication in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of his
vivid sketches of _Washington as a Camp_, describing the march of his
regiment, the famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in the
Capitol at Washington. A tragic interest was given to these papers by
Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861.
While this was still fresh in public recollection his manuscript novels
were published, together with a collection of his stories and sketches
reprinted from the magazines. His novels, though in parts crude and
immature, have a dash and buoyancy--an out-door air about them--which
give the reader a winning impression {559} of Winthrop's personality.
The best of them is, perhaps, _Cecil Dreeme_, a romance that reminds one
a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University
building on Washington Square, a locality that has been further
celebrated in Henry James's novel of _Washington Square_.

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James O'Brien, an
Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore, in 1862, from the effects of a
wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines a
number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which the
_Diamond Lens_ and _What Was It?_ had something of Edgar A. Poe's
quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the pen-name
of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the war, partly
serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note furnished the
magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat of war, among
papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's