his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more
than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony
and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen
into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over
and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as
if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not
often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?
Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the
noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he
wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great
capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in
our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go
tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that
make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round
through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a
track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.
This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of
April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto
operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we
once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the
leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already
turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not
wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from
peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we
cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about through the
twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like
some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us
on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the
feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is,
after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and
shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed
grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact
always reminds us of those unhappy