behind you and around you, thick winrows of corpses on battlefields, countless maimed and sick in hospitals, treachery among Generals, folly in the Executive and Legislative departments, schemers, thieves everywhere,—­cant, credulity, make-believe everywhere.  Thought you greatness was to ripen for you, like a pear?  If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries,—­must pay for it with a proportionate price.  For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections, and invigorations of ideas and men.”

The “Memoranda during the War” is mainly a record of personal experiences, nursing the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals:  most of it is in a low key, simple, unwrought, like a diary kept for one’s self; but it reveals the large, tender, sympathetic soul of the poet even more than his elaborate works, and puts in practical form that unprecedented and fervid comradeship which is his leading element.  It is printed almost verbatim, just as the notes were jotted down at the time and on the spot.  It is impossible to read it without the feeling of tears, while there is elsewhere no such portrayal of the common soldier, and such appreciation of him, as is contained in its pages.  It is heart’s blood, every word of it, and along with “Drum-Taps” is the only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of serious mention.  There are in particular two passages in the “Memoranda” that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and rapid action, like some quick painter covering a large canvas.  I refer to the account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of Bull Run.  What may be called the mass-movement of Whitman’s prose style—­ the rapid marshaling and grouping together of many facts and details, gathering up, and recruiting, and expanding as the sentences move along, till the force and momentum become like a rolling flood, or an army in echelon on the charge—­is here displayed with wonderful effect.

Noting and studying what forces move the world, the only sane explanation that comes to me of the fact that such writing as these little volumes contain has not, in this country especially, met with its due recognition and approval, is that, like all Whitman’s works, they have really never yet been published at all in the true sense,—­have never entered the arena where the great laurels are won.  They have been printed by the author, and a few readers have found them out, but to all intents and purposes they are unknown.