was boastfulness, arrogance, assured claims of sufficient strength, and daring prophecies of success, enough to have made any cause triumphant, if triumph comes through such means.  Still we were incredulous, perhaps foolishly and culpably so,—­but incredulous, and unintimidated, and confident, none the less.  We believed that wise, forbearing, and temperate measures of the new Administration would remove all real grievances, dispel all false alarms, and at least leave open the way to bloodless methods of preserving the Union.  Part of our infatuation consisted in our seeing so plainly the infatuation of the South, while we did not allow for the lengths of wild and reckless folly into which it might drive them.  We could see most plainly that either success in their schemes, or failure through a struggle to accomplish them, would be alike ruinous to them; that no cause standing on the basis and contemplating the objects recognized by them could possibly prosper, so long as the throne of heaven had a sovereign seated upon it.  Full as much, then, from our conviction that the South would not insist upon doing itself such harm as from any fear of what might happen to us, did we refuse to regard Secession as a fixed fact.  At the period of which we are speaking, there was probably not a single man at the North, of well-furnished and well-balanced mind—­who stood clear in heart and pocket of all secret or interested bias toward the South—­that deliberately recognized the probability of the dissolution of the Union.  Very few such men will, indeed, recognize that possibility now, except as they recognize the possibility of the destruction of an edifice of solid blocks and stately columns by the grinding to powder of each large mass of the fabric, so that no rebuilding could restore it.

This was the state of mind and feeling with which we, who had so much at stake and could watch every pulsation of the excitement, contemplated the aspect of our opening strife.  But with the first echo from abroad of its earliest announcements here came the most positive averments in the English papers, with scarcely a single exception, that the knell of this Union had struck.  We had fallen asunder, our bond was broken, we had repudiated our former league or fellowship, and henceforth what had been a unit was to be two or more fragments, in peaceful or hostile relations as the case might be, but never again One.  It would but revive for us the first really sharp and irritating pangs of this dismal experience, to go over the files of papers for those extracts which were like vinegar to our eyes as we first read them.  Their substance is repeated to us in the sheets which come by every steamer.  There were, of course, variations of tone and spirit in these evil prognostications and these raven-like croaks.  Sometimes there was a vein of pity, and of that kind of sorrow which we feel and of that other kind which we express for other people’s troubles.  Sometimes there