The soldier to whom he read
of Christ's Resurrection talked of death to him, and said he did not fear
it. He talked to a man who did not enjoy religion in the way a Christian
means, to whom the mystery of Easter is an all-sufficing "reliance." But
Whitman not only did not fear death. The thought of it was to him the
strangest of raptures, the reverie of a child dreaming of a distant
mother, soon to come again. Death and immortality were but two aspects of
the same blessed hope to this man, who poured out his life in a turgid
fount of ecstatic joy in living:
... And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I
saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splintered and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wives and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.
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