es, widely read here, and with a
deep though saddened interest. By students of the war such works are
hailed as welcome accessories, and tending to the completeness of the
record.

Supposing a happy issue out of present perplexities, then, in the
generation next to come, Southerners there will be yielding allegiance
to the Union, feeling all their interests bound up in it, and yet
cherishing unrebuked that kind of feeling for the memory of the
soldiers of the fallen Confederacy that Burns, Scott, and the Ettrick
Shepherd felt for the memory of the gallant clansmen ruined through
their fidelity to the Stuarts--a feeling whose passion was tempered by
the poetry imbuing it, and which in no wise affected their loyalty to
the Georges, and which, it may be added, indirectly contributed
excellent things to literature. But, setting this view aside,
dishonorable would it be in the South were she willing to abandon to
shame the memory of brave men who with signal personal
disinterestedness warred in her behalf, though from motives, as we
believe, so deplorably astray.

Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity. The mourners who
this summer bear flowers to the mounds of the Virginian and Georgian
dead are, in their domestic bereavement and proud affection, as sacred
in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of
tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs. And
yet, in one aspect, how needless to point the contrast.

Cherishing such sentiments, it will hardly occasion surprise that, in
looking over the battle-pieces in the foregoing collection, I have been
tempted to withdraw or modify some of them, fearful lest in presenting,
though but dramatically and by way of poetic record, the passions and
epithets of civil war, I might be contributing to a bitterness which
every sensible American must wish at an end. So, too, with the emotion
of victory as reproduced on some pages, and particularly toward the
close. It should not be construed into an exultation misapplied--an
exultation as ungenerous as unwise, and made to minister, however
indirectly, to that kind of censoriousness too apt to be produced in
certain natures by success after trying reverses. Zeal is not of
necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with
poetry or patriotism.

There are excesses which marked the conflict, most of which are perhaps
inseparable from a civil strife so intense and prolonge