Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during
the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged--the
only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched
to their uttermost and showed their true form--"Tramp, tramp,
tramp," "John Brown's Body," "Marching through Georgia"--all had a
playful humour running through them. Only one exception do I know,
and that is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an
outsider in time of peace can hardly read it without emotion. I
mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe's "War-Song of the Republic," with
the choral opening line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord." If that were ever sung upon a battle-field the
effect must have been terrific.

A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts
at the other side of the Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
a dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I
was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical,
no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly
ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his
natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who
were his own contemporaries--the finest, perhaps, that the world
has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier
Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How
could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a