“I repeat, I can’t doubt as to the ultimate result.  But I dare say we have all been much mistaken in our calculations as to time.  Days, months, years, are nothing in history.  Men die, man is immortal, practically, even on this earth.  We are so impatient, —­and we are always watching for the last scene of the tragedy.  Now I humbly opine that the drop is only about falling on the first act, or perhaps only the prologue.  This act or prologue will be called, in after days, War for the status quo.  Such enthusiasm, heroism, and manslaughter as status quo could inspire, has, I trust, been not entirely in vain, but it has been proved insufficient.

“I firmly believe that when the slaveholders declared war on the United States government they began a series of events that, in the logical chain of history, cannot come to a conclusion until the last vestige of slavery is gone.  Looking at the whole field for a moment dispassionately, objectively, as the dear Teutonic philosophers say, and merely as an exhibition of phenomena, I cannot imagine any other issue.  Everything else may happen.  This alone must happen.

“But after all this isn’t a war.  It is a revolution.  It is n’t strategists that are wanted so much as believers.  In revolutions the men who win are those who are in earnest.  Jeff and Stonewall and the other Devil-worshippers are in earnest, but it was not written in the book of fate that the slaveholders’ rebellion should be vanquished by a pro-slavery general.  History is never so illogical.  No, the coming ‘man on horseback’ on our side must be a great strategist, with the soul of that insane lion, mad old John Brown, in his belly.  That is your only Promethean recipe:—­

             ’et insani leonis
        Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.’

“I don’t know why Horace runs so in my head this morning. . . .

“There will be work enough for all; but I feel awfully fidgety just now about Port Royal and Hilton Head, and about affairs generally for the next three months.  After that iron-clads and the new levies must make us invincible.”

In another letter, dated November 2, 1862, he expresses himself very warmly about his disappointment in the attitude of many of his old English friends with reference to our civil conflict.  He had recently heard the details of the death of “the noble Wilder Dwight.”

“It is unnecessary,” he says, “to say how deeply we were moved.  I had the pleasure of knowing him well, and I always appreciated his energy, his manliness, and his intelligent cheerful heroism.  I look back upon him now as a kind of heroic type of what a young New Englander ought to be and was.  I tell you that one of these days —­after a generation of mankind has passed away—­these youths will take their places in our history, and be regarded by the