ne, with
her matchless, deep, intense sky, and her sunshine, that cleaves into
your heart, and breaks up all the winter there? What are these sleety
fogs about? Go back into the January thaw, where you belong! What
have the chill rains, and the raw winds, and the dismal, leaden clouds,
and all these flannels and furs to do with June, the perfect June of
hope and beauty and utter joy? Where is the June? Has she lost her way
among the narrow, interminable defiles of your crooked old city
streets? Go out and find her! You do not want her there. No blade
nor blossom will spring from your dingy brick, nor your dull, dead
stone, though you prison her there for a thousand years of wandering.
Take her by the hand tenderly, and bid her forth into the waiting
country, which will give her a queenly reception, and laurels worth the
wearing. Have you fallen in love with her--on the Potomac, O soldiers?
Are you wooing her with honeyed words on the bloody soil of Virginia?
Is she tranced by your glittering sword-shine in ransomed Tennessee?
Is she floating on a lotus-leaf in Florida lagoons? Has she drunk
Nepenthe in the orange-groves? Is she chasing golden apples under the
magnolias? Are you toying with the tangles of her hair in the bright
sea-foam? O, rouse her from her trance, loose the fetters from her
lovely limbs, and speed her to our Northern skies, that moan her long
delay.

Or is she frightened by the thunders of the cannonade sounding from
shore to shore, and wakening the wild echoes? Does she fear to breast
our bristling bayonets? Is she stifled by the smoke of powder? Is she
crouching down Caribbean shores, terror-stricken and pallid? Sweet
June, fear not! The flash of loyal steel will only light you along
your Northern road. Beauty and innocence have nothing to dread from the
sword a patriot wields. The storm that rends the heavens will make
earth doubly fair. Your pathway shall lie over Delectable Mountains,
and through vinelands of Beulah. Come quickly, tread softly, and from
your bountiful bosom scatter seeds as you come, that daisies and
violets may softly shine, and sweetly twine with the amaranth and
immortelle that spring already from heroes' hearts buried in soldiers'
graves.

"But there is no use in placarding her," said Halicarnassus. "We shall
have no warm weather till the eclipse is over."

"So ho!" I said. "Having exhausted every other pretext for delay, you
bring out an eclipse! and