our own--perhaps (dare
we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left!
On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and
measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards,
with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic
despots of the west!"

Here is another passage of a political cast, but showing the same great
pinions and lofty flight:--

"It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of
imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with lines of blood, and
many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
imperfection,--saying, Lo! the roads, the only plans of development,
long, and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in
your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and
present, putting the history of Old World dynasties, conquests, behind
me as of no account,--making a new history, the history of Democracy,
making old history a dwarf,--I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating
time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the
determinations of your Soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and already
specimens of the cost. Behold the anguish of suspense, existence itself
wavering in the balance, uncertain whether to rise or fall; already,
close behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on
battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among
Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers,
thieves everywhere,--cant, credulity, make-believe everywhere. Thought
you greatness was to ripen for you, like a pear? If you would have
greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries,--must
pay for it with a proportionate price. For you, too, as for all lands,
the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth,
the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion,
the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the
ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births,
new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men."

The "Memoranda during the War" is mainly a record of personal
experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals:
most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for
one's self; but it reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the
poet even more than his