comparable to those of the ordinary professional text-books; and any one who can drill a boat’s crew or a ball-club can learn in a very few weeks to drill a company or even a regiment.  Given in addition the power to command, to organize, and to execute,—­high qualities, though not rare in this community,—­and you have a man needing but time and experience to make a general.  More than this can be acquired only by an exclusive absorption in this one art; as Napoleon said, that, to have good soldiers, a nation must be always at war.

If, therefore, duty and opportunity call, count it a privilege to obtain your share in the new career; throw yourself into it as resolutely and joyously as if it were a summer-campaign in the Adirondack, but never fancy for a moment that you have discovered any grander or manlier life than you might be leading every day at home.  It is not needful here to decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a newspaper or a column of attack, Wordsworth’s “Lines on Immortality” or Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done, though posterity seems to remember literature the longest.  The writer is not celebrated for having been the favorite of the conqueror, but sometimes the conqueror only for having favored or even for having spurned the writer.  “When the great Sultan died, his power and glory departed from him, and nothing remained but this one fact, that he knew not the worth of Ferdousi.”  There is a slight delusion in this dazzling glory.  What a fantastic whim the young lieutenants thought it, when General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray’s “Elegy,” “Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than have taken Quebec.”  Yet, no doubt, it is by the memory of that remark that Wolfe will live the longest,—­aided by the stray line of another poet, still reminding us, not needlessly, that “Wolfe’s great name’s cotemporal with our own.”

Once the poets and the sages were held to be pleasing triflers, fit for hours of relaxation in the lulls of war.  Now the pursuits of peace are recognized as the real, and war as the accidental.  It interrupts all higher avocations, as does the cry of fire:  when the fire is extinguished, the important affairs of life are resumed.  Six years ago the London “Times” was bewailing that all thought and culture in England were suspended by the Crimean War.  “We want no more books.  Give us good recruits, at least five feet seven, a good model for a floating-battery, and a gun to take effect at five thousand yards,—­and Whigs and Tories, High and Low Church, the poets, astronomers, and critics, may settle it among themselves.”  How remote seems that epoch now! and how remote will the present soon appear! while art and science will resume their sway serene, beneath skies eternal.  Yesterday I turned from treatises on gunnery and fortification to open Milton’s Latin Poems, which I had never read, and there, in the “Sylvarum Liber,”