30 ORATION. has decreed failure to a cause -for which such blood has been shed. When I think of the heroism displayed in the field, of the devotion shown at home, of the men and women whose lives have been saved from guilty dissipation, or from that utter frivolity which is only a hair’s breadth this side of guilty dissipation, redeemed and consecrated to patriotism, I find some compensation even for the horrors that have befallen us. I see that there is life saved as well as life lost, and, joining with the poet— “ Count it a covenant that He leads us on Beneath the cloud and through the crimson sea.” The part which the women of the North have taken in this contest must not be omitted, often as it has been set forth. When, on the twelfth of May, the glorious Hancock hurled his triumphant columns upon the panic-stricken ranks of Rebellion, first among the foremost, and bravest of the brave was our own “ young gallant ” Barlow. I say our own, for, although enlisted in ‘New York, he was born and bred in Massachusetts ; and bright as her roll of honor is, we cannot afford to lose one such name as his. Soldiers who saw that charge have told me that it was like the bursting of a thunder-cloud; and well I know the fiery soul that lent electric force to the falling bolt. And you will not ask what has this to do with the
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