and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped
in some other way. But she fought it out with him one night on Boston
Commons, and she wished then that she was a man and could go herself. On
that clear, mild night, the blue luminous tinge of whose moon she
remembered so vividly, they walked up and down, they passionately
embraced, they felt the end of life and the mystery of death, and then
at last when the young man said: "I'll go! It's little enough to do in
this crisis!" she clung to him with pride and sacred joy and knew that
life was very great and that it had endless possibilities.

And so Henry Blaine went with his regiment, and the black and terrible
years set in--years in which so often she saw what Walt Whitman had
seen:

"I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw
them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.
I saw the débris and débris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd."