d upon. "Henceforth," said one paper, "the graves at Arlington
will constitute a truly national cemetery;" and the same note was struck
in a thousand other quarters. Poets burst into song at the thought of
their

"Resting together side by side,
Comrades in blue and grey!

"Healed in the tender peace of time,
The wounds that once were red
With hatred and with hostile rage,
While sanguined brothers bled.

"They leaped together at the call
Of country--one in one,
The soldiers of the Northern hills,
And of the Southern sun!

"'Yankee' and 'Rebel,' side by side,
Beneath one starry fold--
To-day, amid our common tears,
Their funeral bells are tolled."

The artlessness of these verses renders them none the less significant.
They express a popular sentiment in popular language. But, as here
expressed, it is clearly the sentiment of the North: how far is it
shared and acknowledged by the South? Happening to be on the spot, I
could not but try to obtain some sort of answer to this question.

Again, as I stood on the terrace of the Capitol that April afternoon,
and looked out across the Potomac to the old Lee mansion at Arlington,
while all the flags of Washington drooped at half-mast, a very
different piece of verse somehow floated into my memory:

"Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor,
For 'alf o' Creation she owns:
We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword and the flame,
And salted it down with our bones.
(Poor beggars!--it's blue with our bones!)"

The association was obvious: how the price of lead would go up if
England brought home all her dead "heroes" in hermetically-sealed
caskets! My thought (so an anti-Imperialist might say) was like the
smile of the hardened freebooter at the amiable sentimentalism of a
comrade who was "yet but young in deed." But why should Mr. Kipling's
rugged lines have cropped up in my memory rather than the smoother
verses of other poets, equally familiar to me, and equally well fitted
to point the contrast?--for instance, Mr. Housman's:--

"It dawns in Asia, tombstones show,
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead."

Or Mr. Newbolt's:

"_Qui procul hinc_--the legend's writ,
The frontier grave is far away;
_Qui ante diem periit,
Sed miles, sed fro patria_."

The reason simply was that during the month I had spent in America the
air had been