We all know what the war fever is in our young men,—­what a devouring passion it becomes in those whom it assails.  Patriotism is the fire of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts.  The love of adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most ardent of our soldiers.  But something of the same fever in a different form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families.  Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character.  Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business.  They stroll up and down the streets, they saunter out upon the public places.  We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke out.  It was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light of the terrible present.  Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had closed his book.  He could not write about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic despatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot.  Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?  Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the noon extra,—­he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do.  The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show.  Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.  This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before us through all those which we have already turned.