O mighty heart!  O brave, heroic soul! 
    Hid in the dim mist of the things that be,
    We call thee up to fill the highest place! 
    Whether to till thy corn and give the tithe,
    Whether to grope a picket in the dark,
    Or, having nobly served, to be cast down,
    And, unregarded, passed by meaner feet,
    Or, happier thou, to snatch the fadeless crown,
    And walk in youth and beauty to God’s rest,—­
    The purpose makes the hero, meet thy doom!

    We call to thee, where’er thy pillowed head
    Rests lonely for the brother who has gone,
    To fix thy gaze on Freedom’s chrysolite,
    Which rueful fate can neither crack nor mar,
    And, hand in hand indissolubly bound
    To thy next fellow, hand and purpose one,
    Stretch thus, a living wall, from the rock coast
    Home to our ripe and yellow heart of the West,
    Impenetrable union triumphing.

    The solemn Autumn comes, the gathering-time! 
    Stand we now ripe, a harvest for the Right! 
    That, when fair Summer shall return to earth,
    Peace may inhabit all her sacred ways,
    Lap in the waves upon melodious sands,
    And linger in the swaying of the corn,
    Or sit with clouds upon the ambient skies,—­
    Summer and Peace brood on the grassy knolls
    Where twilight glimmers over the calm dead,
    While clustered children chant heroic tales.

* * * * *

DEMOCRACY AND THE SECESSION WAR.

The interest which foreign peoples take in our civil war proceeds from two causes chiefly, though there are minor causes that help swell the force of the current of feeling.  The first of these causes is the contemplation of the check which has been given by the war’s occurrence to our march to universal American dominion.  For about seventy-two years our “progress,” as it was called, was more marvellous than the dreams of other nations.  In spite of Indian wars, of wars with France and England and Mexico, of depredations on our commerce by France and England and Barbary, of a currency that seemed to have been created for the promotion of bankruptcy and the organization of instability, of biennial changes in our tariffs and systems of revenue, of competition that ought to have been the death of trade,—­in spite of these and other evils, this country, in the brief term of one not over-long human life, increased in all respects at a rate to excite the gravest fears in the minds of men who had been nursed on the balance-of-power theory.  A new power had intruded itself into the old system, and its disturbing force was beyond all calculation.  Between the day on which George Washington took the Presidential oath and the day when South Carolina broke her oath, our population had increased from something like three millions to more than thirty-one millions; and in all the elements of material strength our increase had far exceeded