therefore, come from life. The vivid
incidents of "The Dresser" are but daguerreotypes of the poet's own actual
movements among the bad cases of the wounded after a battle. The same
personal knowledge runs through "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and
Dim," "Come up from the Fields, Father," etc., etc.

The reader of this section of Whitman's work soon discovers that it is not
the purpose of the poet to portray battles and campaigns, or to celebrate
special leaders or military prowess, but rather to chant the human aspects
of anguish that follow in the train of war. He perhaps feels that the
permanent condition of modern society is that of peace; that war as a
business, as a means of growth, has served its time; and that,
notwithstanding the vast difference between ancient and modern warfare,
both in the spirit and in the means, Homer's pictures are essentially true
yet, and no additions to them can be made. War can never be to us what it
has been to the nations of all ages down to the present; never the main
fact, the paramount condition, tyrannizing over all the affairs of
national and individual life, but only an episode, a passing interruption;
and the poet, who in our day would be as true to his nation and times as
Homer was to his, must treat of it from the standpoint of peace and
progress, and even benevolence. Vast armies rise up in a night and
disappear in a day; a million of men, inured to battle and to blood, go
back to the avocations of peace without a moment's confusion or
delay,--indicating clearly the tendency that prevails.

Apostrophizing the genius of America in the supreme hour of victory, he
says:--

"No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee--nor mastery's rapturous
verse:--
But a little book containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds,
And psalms of the dead."

The collection is also remarkable for the absence of all sectional or
partisan feeling. Under the head of "Reconciliation" are these lines:--

"Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be
utterly lost!
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffi