All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance. And
the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues;
it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured
him intimately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a
theatre, it was a place of education, it was like a season of
religious revival. He watched Lincoln going daily to his
work; he studied and fraternised with young soldiery passing
to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals, reading the
Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a
patient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.
His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read.
From one point of view they seem those of a district visitor;
from another, they look like the formless jottings of an
artist in the picturesque. More than one woman, on whom I
tried the experiment, immediately claimed the writer for a
fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identify
him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary
faculty of style. And yet the story touches home; and if you
are of the weeping order of mankind, you will certainly find
your eyes fill with tears, of which you have no reason to be
ashamed. There is only one way to characterise a work of
this order, and that is to quote. Here is a passage from a
letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in
hospital:-
"Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical
treatment, nursing, etc.
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