The dead in this war--there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south--Virginia, the Peninsula--Malvern hill and Fair Oaks--the banks of the Chickahominy--the terraces of Fredericksburgh--Antietam bridge--the grisly ravines of Manassas--the bloody promenade of the Wilderness--the varieties of the _strayed_ dead, (the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill'd in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown'd--15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities--2,000 graves cover'd by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)--Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest--Vicksburgh--Chattanooga--the trenches of Petersburgh--the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere--the crop reap'd by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations--and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante's pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments, excell'd those prisons)--the dead, the dead, the dead--_our_ dead--or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)--or East or West--Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley--somewhere they crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills--(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach'd bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet)--our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us--the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend--the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee--the single graves left in the woods or by the roadside, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)--the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)--some lie at the bottom of the sea--the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States--the infinite dead--(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)--not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil--thousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.