coming in the hereafter,—­Christmas-days, and heartsome warmth; in these bare hills trampled down by armed men, the yellow clay is quick with pulsing fibres, hints of the great heart of life and love throbbing within; God’s slanted sunlight would show me, in these sullen smoke-clouds from the camp, walls of amethyst and jasper, outer ramparts of the Promised Land.  Do not call us traitors, then, who choose to be cool and silent through the fever of the hour,—­who choose to search in common things for auguries of the hopeful, helpful calm to come, finding even in these poor sweet-peas, thrusting their tendrils through the brown mould, a deeper, more healthful lesson for the eye and soul than warring evils or truths.  Do not call me a traitor, if I dare weakly to hint that there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a man may appear creditably in the great masquerade, and not blush when it is over; or if I tell you a story of To-Day, in which there shall be none of the red glare of war,—­only those homelier, subtler lights which we have overlooked.  If it prove to you that the sun of old times still shines, and the God of old times still lives, is not that enough?

My story is very crude and homely, as I said,—­only a rough sketch of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call “dregs” sometimes,—­a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets.  I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find here:  New England idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have indenizened themselves in everybody’s home.  You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and glow in you.  I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it.  Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do not see.

Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now.  Ha! that is spirit-stirring!—­that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood!  Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor daily necessity for bread and butter.  I want you to go down into this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not be in it also a great warfare.  Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble, though even its only end may appear to be your daily food.  A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the world, and not without its pathos.  It has its slain.  Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep under every green hill-side.