what an ebb and flow of letters, bearing solemnity and love upon their surface! what anxiety among us, with all its brave housekeeping shifts, to keep want from the door while labor is paralyzed, and the strong arms have beaten their ploughshares into swords!  What self-sacrifice of millions of humble wives and daughters whose works and sorrows are now refining the history of their country, and lifting the popular nobleness:  they are giving all that they are to keep their volunteers in the field.  The flag waves over no such faithfulness; its stars sparkle not like this sincerity.  The feeling and heroism of women are enough to refresh and to remould the generation.  Like subtle lightning, the womanly nature is penetrating the life of the age.  From every railroad-station the ponderous train bore off its freight of living valor, amid the cheers of sympathizing thousands who clustered upon every shed and pillar, and yearned forward as if to make their tumultuous feelings the motive power to carry those dear friends away.  What an ardent and unquenchable emotion!  Drums do not throb like these hearts, bullets do not patter like these tears.  There is not a power of the soul which is not vitalized and expanded by these scenes.  But long after the crowd vanishes, there stands a woman at the corner, with a tired child asleep upon her shoulder; the bosom does not heave so strongly as to break its sleep.  There are no regrets in the calm, proud face; no, indeed!—­for it is the face of our country, waiting to suffer and be strong for liberty, and to put resolutely the dearest thing where it can serve mankind.  In her face read the history of the future as it shall be sung and written by pens which shall not know whence their sharpened impulse springs; the page shall reflect the working of that woman’s face, daughter of the people; and when exulting posterity shall draw new patriotism from it, and declare that it is proud, pathetic, resolved, sublime, they shall not yet call it by its Christian name, for that will be concealed with moss upon her forgotten head-stone.

* * * * *

AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE.

  O good painter, tell me true,
    Has your hand the cunning to draw
    Shapes of things that you never saw? 
  Ay?  Well, here is an order for you.

  Woods and cornfields, a little brown,—­
    The picture must not be over-bright,—­
    Yet all in the golden and gracious light
  Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.

    Alway and alway, night and morn,
    Woods upon woods, with fields of corn
      Lying between them, not quite sere,
  And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,
  When the wind can hardly find breathing-room
      Under their tassels,—­cattle near,
  Biting shorter the short green grass,
  And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
  With bluebirds twittering all around,—­