For weeks past this nightmare of war has been riding us.  The City was already gloomy enough.  When a great domestic grief and misfortune visits the chief person of the State, the heart of the people, too, is sad and awe-stricken.  It might be this sorrow and trial were but presages of greater trials and sorrow to come.  What if the sorrow of war is to be added to the other calamity?  Such forebodings have formed the theme of many a man’s talk, and darkened many a fireside.  Then came the rapid orders for ships to arm and troops to depart.  How many of us have had to say farewell to friends whom duty called away with their regiments; on whom we strove to look cheerfully, as we shook their hands, it might be for the last time; and whom our thoughts depicted, treading the snows of the immense Canadian frontier, where their intrepid little band might have to face the assaults of other enemies than winter and rough weather!  I went to a play one night, and protest I hardly know what was the entertainment which passed before my eyes.  In the next stall was an American gentleman, who knew me.  “Good heavens, sir,” I thought, “is it decreed that you and I are to be authorized to murder each other next week; that my people shall be bombarding your cities, destroying your navies, making a hideous desolation of your coast; that our peaceful frontier shall be subject to fire, rapine, and murder?” “They will never give up the men,” said the Englishman.  “They will never give up the men,” said the American.  And the Christmas piece which the actors were playing proceeded like a piece in a dream.  To make the grand comic performance doubly comic, my neighbor presently informed me how one of the best friends I had in America—­the most hospitable, kindly, amiable of men, from whom I had twice received the warmest welcome and the most delightful hospitality—­was a prisoner in Fort Warren, on charges by which his life perhaps might be risked.  I think that was the most dismal Christmas fun which these eyes ever looked on.

Carry out that notion a little farther, and depict ten thousand, a hundred thousand homes in England saddened by the thought of the coming calamity, and oppressed by the pervading gloom.  My next-door neighbor perhaps has parted with her son.  Now the ship in which he is, with a thousand brave comrades, is ploughing through the stormy midnight ocean.  Presently (under the flag we know of) the thin red line in which her boy forms a speck, is winding its way through the vast Canadian snows.  Another neighbor’s boy is not gone, but is expecting orders to sail; and some one else, besides the circle at home maybe, is in prayer and terror, thinking of the summons which calls the young sailor away.  By firesides modest and splendid, all over the three kingdoms, that sorrow is keeping watch, and myriads of hearts beating with that thought, “Will they give up the men?”