But this was not all which prevented him from going forth to battle. The cry of his mother's heart was, "My son, how can I let thee go?" She was an abolitionist, as was almost every body of her set in New Boston; she was an enthusiastic patriot, as was almost every one in the north during that sublime summer of popular enthusiasm; but this war--oh, this strange, ferocious war! was horrible. Her sensitively affectionate nature, blinded by veils of womanly tenderness, folded in habits of life-long peace, could not see the hard, inevitable necessity of the contest. Earnestly as she sympathised with its loyal and humane objects, she was not logical enough or not firm enough to sympathise with the iron thing itself. Lapped in sweet influences of peace all her loving life, why must she be called to death amid the clamor of murderous contests? For her health was failing; a painful and fatal disease had fastened its clutches on her; another year's course she did not hope to run. And if the hateful struggle must go on, if it must torment her last few days with its agitations and horrors, so much the more did she need her only child. Other women's sons--yes, if there was no help for it--but not hers--might put on the panoply of strife, and disappear from anxiously following eyes into the smoke and flame of battle. Edward told her every day the warlike news of the journals, the grand and stern putting on of the harness, the gigantic plans for crushing the nation's foes. She could take no interest in such tidings but that of aversion. He read to her in a voice which thrilled like swellings of martial music, Tennyson's Charge of the Six Hundred. She listened to the clarion-toned words with distaste and almost with horror. Well, the summer wore away, that summer of sombre preparation and preluding skirmishes, whose scattering musketry and thin cannonade faintly prophecied the orchestral thunders of Gettysburg and the Wilderness, and whose few dead preceded like skirmishers the massive columns which for years should firmly follow them into the dark valley. Its forereaching shadows fell upon many homes far away from the battlefield, and chilled to death many sensitive natures. Old persons and invalids sank into the grave that season under the oppression of its straining suspense and preliminary horror; and among these victims, whom no man has counted and whom few have thought of collectively, was the mother of Colburne.