The sky dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the
moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that
great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west,
suffused the soul. Then I heard slow and clear the deliberate
notes of a bugle come up out of the silence ... firm and
faithful, floating along, rising, falling leisurely, with here
and there a long-drawn note.... sounding tattoo.
"A steady rain, dark and thick and warm," he writes again, two days after
Gettysburg. "The cavalry camp is a ceaseless field of observation to me.
This forenoon there stood the horses, tether'd together, dripping,
steaming, chewing their hay. The men emerge from their tents, dripping
also. The fires are half-quench'd." There is a poetic poise in this
brief, vivid statement, apart from its bare economy of means. It is the
lump awaiting the leaven no less than is "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." To
this supreme spectator an apple orchard in May, even the White House in
moonlight, no more and no less than these battle-scenes, rendered up
their dignity, life, and beauty, their true human significance. But in
"Drum-Taps" the witness is not always so satisfactory. The secret has
evaporated in the effort to _make_ poetry, or half-consciously to inject
a moral, to play the Universal Bard.
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