So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants.  Take the first trifling example which comes to our recollection.  A sad disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of two gentlemen and a lady.  Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees.  The lady had a “grande revolution,” as French patients say,—­went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day.  Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more serious cause.  An old, gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon’s return from Elba.  One of our early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was thought to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements of the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,—­what a devouring passion it becomes in those whom it assails.  Patriotism is the fire of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts.  The love of adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most ardent of our soldiers.  But something of the same fever in a different form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families.  Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character.  Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business.  They stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places.  We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke out.  It was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light of the terrible present.  Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had closed his book.  He could not write about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot.  Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?  Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the noon extra,—­he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.