Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 | Page 8

splenetic Byron declared that the only distinction was to be a
little undistinguished. No doubt, war brings out grand and unexpected
qualities, and there is a perennial fascination in the Elizabethan
Raleighs and Sidneys, alike heroes of pen and sword. But the fact is
patent, that there is scarcely any art whose rudiments are so easy to
acquire as the military; the manuals of tactics have no difficulties
comparable to those of the ordinary professional text-books; and any

one who can drill a boat's crew or a ball-club can learn in a very few
weeks to drill a company or even a regiment. Given in addition the
power to command, to organize, and to execute,--high qualities, though
not rare in this community,--and you have a man needing but time and
experience to make a general. More than this can be acquired only by
an exclusive absorption in this one art; as Napoleon said, that, to have
good soldiers, a nation must be always at war.
If, therefore, duty and opportunity call, count it a privilege to obtain
your share in the new career; throw yourself into it as resolutely and
joyously as if it were a summer-campaign in the Adirondack, but never
fancy for a moment that you have discovered any grander or manlier
life than you might be leading every day at home. It is not needful here
to decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a
newspaper or a column of attack, Wordsworth's "Lines on Immortality"
or Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done,
though posterity seems to remember literature the longest. The writer is
not celebrated for having been the favorite of the conqueror, but
sometimes the conqueror only for having favored or even for having
spurned the writer. "When the great Sultan died, his power and glory
departed from him, and nothing remained but this one fact, that he
knew not the worth of Ferdousi." There is a slight delusion in this
dazzling glory. What a fantastic whim the young lieutenants thought it,
when General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray's "Elegy,"
"Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than have taken
Quebec." Yet, no doubt, it is by the memory of that remark that Wolfe
will live the longest,--aided by the stray line of another poet, still
reminding us, not needlessly, that "Wolfe's great name's cotemporal
with our own."
Once the poets and the sages were held to be pleasing triflers, fit for
hours of relaxation in the lulls of war. Now the pursuits of peace are
recognized as the real, and war as the accidental. It interrupts all higher
avocations, as does the cry of fire: when the fire is extinguished, the
important affairs of life are resumed. Six years ago the London "Times"
was bewailing that all thought and culture in England were suspended
by the Crimean War. "We want no more books. Give us good recruits,
at least five feet seven, a good model for a floating-battery, and a gun
to take effect at five thousand yards,--and Whigs and Tories, High and

Low Church, the poets, astronomers, and critics, may settle it among
themselves." How remote seems that epoch now! and how remote will
the present soon appear! while art and science will resume their sway
serene, beneath skies eternal. Yesterday I turned from treatises on
gunnery and fortification to open Milton's Latin Poems, which I had
never read, and there, in the "Sylvarum Liber," I came upon a passage
as grand as anything in "Paradise Lost,"--his description of Plato's
archetypal man, the vast ideal of the human race, eternal, incorrupt,
coeval with the stars, dwelling either in the sidereal spaces, or among
the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored
confines of the habitable globe. There stood the majestic image, veiled
in a dead language, yet still visible; and it was as if one of the poet's
own sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of
Olympus. Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and
diplomacy ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there
seemed nothing real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man.
Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties. In all free
governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the dramatis
personae of the hour. How empty to us are now the names of the great
politicians of the last generation, as Crawford and Lowndes!--yet it is
but a few years since these men filled in the public ear as large a space
as Clay or Calhoun afterwards, and when they died, the race of the
giants was thought ended. The path to oblivion of these later idols is
just as sure; even Webster will be to the