abnormal eccentricities,
which will pass quietly away, when the dynasty is changed, and the reins
of power are fairly grasped by the successful rival.

Europe sends her doctors to witness our dissolution. They go South and
see the mustering of arms and the intensity of purpose, and coming North
find the whole community at their usual pursuits and pleasures,
regarding the controversy as a mere political breeze, and the results in
which it is beginning to issue as but the waves that ever for a short
season roll fiercely after the storm.

This indifference was one of the best signs of our health. We felt such
confidence in ourselves, that we distrusted no future, however
cloud-cast. The Constitution, sold for a penny-ha'penny in New York,
suggested to the mildly sarcastic humor of Dr. Russell that it had
better be a little more valuable in tact, if not so cheap in form. He
did not see how the People were the rightful masters of the
Constitution, as Mr. Lincoln had said they were of Congress and the
Courts, and that they would take care of it and of themselves when the
hour really came.

We did not see it. Blindness in part had happened unto the whole nation.
The shot at Sumter cleft the burdened head of Jove. A Nation was born in
a day. It saw instantly the length and the breadth, the height and the
depth of the conflict. It was not a struggle about Slavery and
Abolitionism, about the white race and the black, about union and
disunion; but it was a war for the rights of man, here and everywhere,
to-day and forever. The "glittering generalities" of our Declaration and
Constitution suddenly blazed with light, while the dull particularities
of mere routine faded as a waning moon before the glowing sun. These
were lost in the fiery splendors of the grand principles in which alone
they live and move and have their being. They will reappear, meekly
shining in their humbler sphere, when the great light shall withdraw its
intenser rays, the object of their blazing being accomplished. The body
of the war is Union, its soul Democracy: union for the sake of
democracy, and democracy for the sake of the world. Abolitionism is
simply a stepping-stone to the perfection of the Idea in our society.

The instinct that apprehended the full significance of the struggle was
universal: Europe saw it in the same flash that revealed it to us. The
lightning of the opening gun, or ever its accompanying thunder could
follow, leaped, like the lig