he plain,
And while we talked the mighty past
Around us lived and breathed again!"

That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really to
find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat
the discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the War, simply as
the American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the
epaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native,
which he smiled and gasped--to the increase of his happy shortness of
breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of
personal soundness--at feeling himself so _like_ to be. As strange, yet
as still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at a
distance, of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educational
varnish, the possession of the "advantages," the tongues, the degrees,
the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk
in--a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been
viewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps
sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view
it--judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the North as the
whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure.
I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as at
once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as
vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction,
some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young
character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and
with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so that
the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which
without its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turn
nothing--that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, most
enjoyed--did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possible
States, New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island (though I think the
first) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all went
on for him at the start in McClellan's and later on in Grant's army,
and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed
by his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held,
I believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow
that, his term being up, he would not, should he