in all the dignity of freedom and virtue--a form which made the whole earth glad and the heavens clap their hands in exultation. What giant leaps the nation made in manhood and heroism, strides following each other thick and fast, until the most cynical of the doubters of humanity began to open their eyes, and acknowledge that they would not have thought her capable of such unexampled deeds. The national heroism which the Northern people have displayed is indeed unparalleled. They have risen up as one man to the support of the Government. They have offered property and life and the most sacred treasures of the heart upon the shrine of constitutional liberty. At the sound of the drum, they have left the farm and the barn, the anvil and the mill, the church and the forum, and formed into the grand army of invincibles which, at the word of command, have marched forward, conquering and resistless. They have borne patiently with delay and defeat, with blunders and crimes, with humiliation and taxation, and have, in short, proved themselves _Americans_ worthy of the name. Of course, national heroism has inspired individual heroism, and to-day the country blazes from frontier to metropolis with gallant records of daring deeds. Their number is infinite; they can not be individually remembered, but only massed together, one sublime mosaic by which the gallantry and heroism of the free, untrammeled North is proved. We doubt not there is a leaf for each hero in the heroic record of heaven, and the due share of hero-worship paid to each by those angels who love to pore over the chronicles of earth. And we mourn less over the coming of this war at the present time than we should, did we not perceive that sooner or later it was inevitable. It was written in the fate-book of God. Never before was war so emphatically a war of principle. It mitigates the suffering much to know this. It is something to know that all the brave men who have fallen have fallen for the right; and when we believe so, we do firmly believe that their death will give liberty and happiness to millions yet to be. We can not think but that their lives are well spent. There are some who are written upon God's muster-scroll as martyrs to liberty. Who would not esteem it a happiness and a glory to belong to this Old Guard, who from age to age have rallied and rallied and rallied to the support of liberty, to the rescue of this holy sepulchre from the hands of desolators and barbarians, who have ever fought where the fight was thickest, have ever been the advance-guard of the world in its onward progress, and been enshrined in the great heart of the world, there to glow like the stars forever and ever? Is it a hardship to die that one may live forever? Is it a hardship to die that millions who now live in wailing and woe, in chains and degradation, may live in happiness and freedom in all time to come? The voice of the great army of American