in the
fight--and possibly, before long, they would help to do away their own
necessity, by detailing what they beheld. Is that the reason why there
is no such establishment? The question is asked, not in bitterness, but
to suggest a self-interrogation to the instincts of war.

I have not thought proper to put notes to the poem, detailing the
horrors which I have touched upon; nor even to quote my authorities,
which are unfortunately too numerous, and contain worse horrors still.
They are furnished by almost every history of a campaign, in all
quarters of the world. Circumstances so painful, in a first attempt to
render them public for their own sakes, would, I thought, even meet with
less attention in prose than in verse, however less fitted they may
appear for it at first sight. Verse, if it has any enthusiasm, at once
demands and conciliates attention; it proposes to say much in little;
and it associates with it the idea of something consolatory, or
otherwise sustaining. But there is one prose specimen of these details,
which I will give, because it made so great an impression on me in my
youth, that I never afterwards could help calling it to mind when war
was spoken of; and as I had a good deal to say on that subject, having
been a public journalist during one of the most interesting periods of
modern history, and never having been blinded into an admiration of war
by the dazzle of victory, the circumstance may help to show how salutary
a record of this kind may be, and what an impression the subject might
be brought to make on society. The passage is in a note to one of Mr
Southey's poems, the "Ode to Horror," and is introduced by another
frightful record, less horrible, because there is not such agony implied
in it, nor is it alive.

"I extract" (says Mr Southey) "the following picture of consummate
horror from notes to a poem written in twelve-syllable verse, upon the
campaign of 1794 and 1795: it was during the retreat to Deventer. 'We
could not proceed a hundred yards without perceiving the dead bodies of
men, women, children, and horses, in every direction. One scene made an
impression upon my memory which time will never be able to efface. Near
another cart we perceived a stout-looking man and a beautiful young
woman, with an infant, about seven months old, at the breast, all three
frozen and dead. The mother had most certainly expired in the act of
suckling her child; as with one breast exposed she lay up