own before.' We were in the
little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr.
Alcott stood in front of the fire-place, his long gray hair streaming
over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to
another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the
orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated
before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with
profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his
arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing,
sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.

"I had come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the
filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate
camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and
glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well
improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for
honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an
armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the
slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who
listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my
cherry-tree time, when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders
debouching in the misty fields."

The youth who reads may ask in wonder, "And was then the war to which we
have been used to look back with exultation and pride,--was it but a
horror and a crime?" No; it was something other and more than that; it
had its aspects of moral grandeur and of gain for humanity; it was a
field for noble self-sacrifice, for utmost striving of men and deepest
tenderness of women, it had its heroes and martyrs and saints; it was in
the large view the tremendous price of national unity and universal
freedom. But in the exaltation of these better aspects, we have as a
people too much forgotten the other and awful side. That is what we need
now to be reminded of. For among our present dangers none is greater
than the false glorification of war. Against such glorifications stands
Sherman's word, "War is hell." And on that grand tomb with which our
greatest city crowns its proudest height is inscribed, as the one word
by which Grant forever speaks to his countrymen, "Let us have peace."

The nobler side of the war is told and will be told in many a history
and biography, romance and poem. In the broad view, the