Is it a dream? Nay but the lack of it the dream, And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream. * * * * * Now he passed back up the lane to the little farmstead, and, entering in, found the midday meal was served. Mr. Stafford was already seated and about to say grace. Whitman stopped as he passed behind the farmer's chair, and clasping Stafford's head in his large, well-formed hands, became an actual part, as it were, in the benediction. Then he took his seat in silence. But that irrepressible joyousness which sometimes, after working on a manuscript, seemed to shine from his face and pervade his whole body,--that "singular brightness and delight, as though he had partaken of some divine elixir"--was visible now upon his noble features. He talked a little, in simple homely phrases,--giving little idea of the voluminous reserve force within him: telling little incidents of the War of Secession and anecdotes of his hospital experiences. He had been a volunteer nurse of exquisite patience and admirable efficiency throughout those terrible years 1862-64. His passionate tenderness and sympathy then found vent: and he gave his best and uttermost: believing that (in his own words) "these libations, extatic life-pourings, as it were, of precious wine or rose-water on vast desert-sands or great polluted rivers, taking chances of _no return_,--what are they but the theory and practice ... of Christ or of all divine personality?" For in the human, however defaced, he still could discern the divine and immortal. The worth of every individual soul was the pivot of all his arts and beliefs: "Because, having looked at the objects of the Universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul." Usually, to his sensitive mind, able as it was to realise with the keenest sympathy every phase of human suffering, the memories of carnage were repulsive. By day he could shut them off: but by night, he said, In clouds descending, in midnight sleep, of many a face in battle, Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, of that indescribable look, Of the dead on their backs, with arms extended wide-- I dream, I dream, I dream. (_Old War Dreams._) But he had faith in the future of his country, vast hopes in the purification wrought out by those sorrowful years: and his poem _To the Man-of-War Bird_ was but one of many allegories in which he saw his beloved America rising transfigured from the ashes of the past. Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, Waking renew'd on thy prodigious pinions, (Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended'st, And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)....