sum, and rises no higher.

But we hope that the people will not altogether relinquish the purpose
of monumental commemoration of the war, and we are not wholly inclined
to lament that the fever-heat of their first intent exhausted itself in
dreams of shafts and obelisks, groups and statues, which would probably
have borne as much relation to the real idea of Lincoln's life, and the
war and time which his memory embodies and represents, as the poetry of
the war has borne. In the cool moments of our convalescence from civil
disorder, may we not think a little more clearly, and choose rather more
wisely than would have been possible earlier?

No doubt there is in every epoch a master-feeling which art must obey,
if it would flourish, and remain to represent something intelligible
after the epoch is past. We know by the Gothic churches of Italy how
mightily the whole people of that land were once moved by the impulses
of their religion (which might be, and certainly was, a thing very
different from purity and goodness): the Renaissance temples remind us
of a studious period passionately enamored of the classic past; in the
rococo architecture and sculpture of a later time, we have the idle
swagger, the unmeaning splendor, the lawless luxury, of an age corrupted
by its own opulence, and proud of its licentious slavery. Had anything
come of the aesthetic sensation immediately following the war, and the
spirit of martial pride with which it was so largely mixed, we should
probably have had a much greater standing-army in bronze and marble than
would have been needed for the suppression of any future rebellion. An
excitement, a tumult, not a tendency of our civilization, would thus
have been perpetuated, to misrepresent us and our age to posterity; for
we are not a military people, (though we certainly know how to fight
upon occasion,) and the pride which we felt in our army as a body, and
in the men merely as soldiers, was an exultation which has already in a
great part subsided. Indeed, the brave fellows have themselves meantime
given us a lesson, in the haste they have made to put off their
soldier-costume and resume the free and individual dress of the
civilian. The ignorant poets might pipe of the glory and splendor of
war, but these men had seen the laurel growing on the battle-field, and
knew

"Di che lagrime grondi e di che sangue"

its dazzling foliage. They knew that the fighting, in itself horrible,
and only