of one
hundred and twenty-five thousand men in the full flush and vigor of
life, calmly and deliberately making ready at dawn to receive death
in its most horrid forms at one another's hands. It is in vain that
Religion invests the tomb with terror, and Philosophy, shuddering,
averts her face; the nations turn from these gloomy teachers to storm
its portals in exultant hosts, battering them wide enough for thousands
to charge through abreast. The heroic instinct of humanity with its
high contempt of death is wiser and truer, never let us doubt,
than superstitious terrors or philosophic doubts. It testifies to a
conviction, deeper than reason, that man is greater than his seeming
self; to an underlying consciousness that his mortal life is but an
accident of his real existence, the fashion of a day, to be lightly worn
and gayly doffed at duty's call.

What a pity it truly is that the tonic air of battlefields--the air
that Philip breathed that night before Antietam--cannot be gathered
up and preserved as a precious elixir to reinvigorate the atmosphere in
times of peace, when men grow faint of heart and cowardly, and quake at
thought of death.

The soldiers huddled in their blankets on the ground slept far more
soundly that night before the battle than their men-folk and women-folk
in their warm beds at home. For them it was a night of watching, a vigil
of prayers and tears. The telegraph in those days made of the nation an
intensely sensitive organism, with nerves a thousand miles long. Ere its
echoes had died away, every shot fired at the front had sent a tremor
to the anxious hearts at home. The newspapers and bulletin boards in
all the towns and cities of the North had announced that a great battle
would surely take place the next day, and, as the night closed in, a
mighty cloud of prayer rose from innumerable firesides, the self-same
prayer from each, that he who had gone from that home might survive the
battle, whoever else must fall.

The wife, lest her own appeal might fail, taught her cooing baby to lisp
the father's name, thinking that surely the Great Father's heart would
not be able to resist a baby's prayer. The widowed mother prayed that if
it were consistent with God's will he would spare her son. She laid her
heart, pierced through with many sorrows, before Him. She had borne so
much, life had been so hard, her boy was all she had to show for so much
endured,--might not this cup pass? Pale, impassione