ble for the current saying, History is philosophy teaching by
examples. This definition is about as valuable as some of those other
definitions that express one art in terms of another: poetry in terms of
painting, and painting in terms of poetry. "Architecture is frozen
music" does not enable us to understand either perpendicular Gothic or a
fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines history in terms of
philosophy, or a philosopher philosophy in terms of history, you may be
on the lookout for sophistication. Your philosophical historian points
his moral by adorning his tale. Your historical philosopher allows no
zigzags in the march of his evolution.

In like manner, the attempt to express one war in terms of another is
apt to lead to a wresting of facts. No two wars are as like as two peas.
Yet as any two marriages in society will yield a certain number of
resemblances, so will any two wars in history, whether war itself be
regarded as abstract or concrete,--a question that seems to have
exercised some grammatical minds, and ought therefore to be settled
before any further step is taken in this disquisition, which is the
disquisition of a grammarian. Now most persons would pronounce war an
abstract, but one excellent manual with which I am acquainted sets it
down as a concrete, and I have often thought that the author must have
known something practically about war. At all events, to those who have
seen the midday sun darkened by burning homesteads, and wheatfields
illuminated by stark forms in blue and gray, war is sufficiently
concrete. The very first dead soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes
war forever out of the category of abstracts.

[Note: JOHN AUGUSTINE WASHINGTON, 'as always in the Washington family'
W. GORDON McCABE.]

When I was a student abroad, American novices used to be asked in jest,
"Is this your first ruin?" "Is this your first nightingale?" I am not
certain that I can place my first ruin or my first nightingale, but I
can recall my first dead man on the battlefield. We were making an
advance on the enemy's position near Huttonsville. Nothing, by the way,
could have been more beautiful than the plan, which I was privileged to
see; and as we neared the objective point, it was a pleasure to watch
how column after column, marching by this road and that, converged to
the rendezvous. It was as if some huge spider were gathering its legs
about the victim. The special order issued breathed a spirit