I demand races of
orbic bards, he rhapsodizes, sweet democratic despots, to dominate and
even destroy. The Future! Vistas! The throes of birth are upon us.
Allons, camarado!
He could not despair. "Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of
the baffled?" he asks himself in "Drum-Taps." But wildest shuttlecock of
criticism though he is, he has never yet been charged with looking only
on the dark side of things. Once, he says, "Once, before the war (alas! I
dare not say how many times the mood has come!), I too, was fill'd with
doubt and gloom." His part in it soothed, mellowed, deepened his great
nature. He had himself witnessed such misery, cruelty, and abomination as
it is best just now, perhaps, not to read about. One fact alone is
enough; that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation
in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had
wrecked his health. During 1862-65 he visited, he says, eighty to a
hundred thousand sick and wounded soldiers, comprehending all, slighting
none. Rebel or compatriot, it made no difference. "I loved the young
man," he cries again and again. Pity and fatherliness were in his face,
for his heart was full of them. Mr. Gosse has described "the old Gray" as
he saw him in 1884, in his bare, littered sun-drenched room in Camden,
shared by kitten and canary:
He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as
if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than
other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards.
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