9 agony of those who could not die, doomed to carry about a life too strong for wounds, though not too strong for woe. We see the field when the battle is over, when the hosts are gone, and the fruits of war are ripe to rottenness ; and then our natures are overpowered by the complication of feeling; of pity, which draws us on, and honor, which revolts and repels us, and we shut our eyes and wave the dark vision away. And, in another part of the picture, we seem to stand among the prisoners of war, packed together in starvation and filth; dying of unmedicated wounds, or by the slow torture of hunger and cold. And as we draw back our gaze to the foreground that is nearest to us, we count for every single sufferer on the field or in the prison, a sympathizing group, of which he was once the centre, and in whom his agony is multiplied over and over. And this is but a fraction of the woe. I presume that war can have no adequate picture. It can tell its own story only to witnessing eyes and ears upon the spot, and they can never catalogue its horrors, for no eye and ear can know the cruelties that are going on every where at once, and no heart could sustain itself against the crushing accumulation if all the agonies were massed into one view. Say “ War,” and you have pronounced a word whose one syllable contains all animal sorrow concentrated. Prefix the adjective and call it u Civil War" and you add a social and a 9
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