The reader of this section of Whitman's work soon discovers that it is not the purpose of the poet to portray battles and campaigns, or to celebrate special leaders or military prowess, but rather to chant the human aspects of anguish that follow in the train of war. He perhaps feels that the permanent condition of modern society is that of peace; that war as a business, as a means of growth, has served its time; and that, notwithstanding the vast difference between ancient and modern warfare, both in the spirit and in the means, Homer's pictures are essentially true yet, and no additions to them can be made. War can never be to us what it has been to the nations of all ages down to the present; never the main fact, the paramount condition, tyrannizing over all the affairs of national and individual life, but only an episode, a passing interruption; and the poet, who in our day would be as true to his nation and times as Homer was to his, must treat of it from the standpoint of peace and progress, and even benevolence. Vast armies rise up in a night and disappear in a day; a million of men, inured to battle and to blood, go back to the avocations of peace without a moment's confusion or delay,--indicating clearly the tendency that prevails. Apostrophizing the genius of America in the supreme hour of victory, he says:-- "No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee--nor mastery's rapturous verse:-- But a little book containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead." The collection is also remarkable for the absence of all sectional or partisan feeling. Under the head of "Reconciliation" are these lines:-- "Word over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost! That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; ... For my enemy is dead--a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near; I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin." Perhaps the most noteworthy of Whitman's war poems is the one called "When Lilacs last in the Door-yard bloomed," written in commemoration of President Lincoln.