Much of the time he sleeps, or half sleeps.... I often come and sit by him in perfect silence; he will breathe for ten minutes as softly and evenly as a young babe asleep. Poor youth, so handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, without the least start awaken'd, open'd his eyes, gave me a long steady look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier--one long, clear, silent look--a slight sigh--then turn'd back and went into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover'd near. The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans. The sky dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west, suffused the soul. Then I heard slow and clear the deliberate notes of a bugle come up out of the silence ... firm and faithful, floating along, rising, falling leisurely, with here and there a long-drawn note.... sounding tattoo. "A steady rain, dark and thick and warm," he writes again, two days after Gettysburg. "The cavalry camp is a ceaseless field of observation to me. This forenoon there stood the horses, tether'd together, dripping, steaming, chewing their hay. The men emerge from their tents, dripping also. The fires are half-quench'd." There is a poetic poise in this brief, vivid statement, apart from its bare economy of means. It is the lump awaiting the leaven no less than is "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." To this supreme spectator an apple orchard in May, even the White House in moonlight, no more and no less than these battle-scenes, rendered up their dignity, life, and beauty, their true human significance. But in "Drum-Taps" the witness is not always so satisfactory. The secret has evaporated in the effort to _make_ poetry, or half-consciously to inject a moral, to play the Universal Bard. There creeps into the words a tinge of the raw and the grotesque. The poet has the look of a cowboy off the stage, tanned with grease-paint. But again and again the secret creeps back and some lovely emanation of poetry is added to it: Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. Or this, called "Reconciliation":