and in Frank Moore's
great collection, the _Rebellion Record_; in numerous regimental
histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W.
Swinton's _Army of the Potomac_; in the autobiographies and
recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the
"war papers," lately published in the _Century_ magazine, and in
innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both
sides.

The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of
which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes,
Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the
work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark.
There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much literary
value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's Southern ballad,
_Maryland, My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger
Horatius_, and the grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old
Methodist hymn, to which the Northern armies beat time as they went
"marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its
fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "Northern
scum," the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press. To furnish
the _John Brown_ chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward
Howe wrote her _Battle-Hymn of the Republic_, a noble poem, but rather
too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the
soldiers. Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the
patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and home-comings,
of women waiting by desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of
husbands and sons who had gone to the war; or which celebrated
individual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and
heartbreaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of
too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. Among the best
or the most popular of them were Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the
Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's _All Quiet Along the Potomac_; Forceythe
Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of
the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy
were Henry Timrod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of
Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of
the West, as correspondent for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he
became assistant editor o