roslyn, June 26, 1865
I have for some time
past thought of writing to you, by way of congratulating you on the suppression
of the rebellion and the close of our bloody Civil War. And yet I have nothing
to say on the subject which is not absolutely commonplace. All that can be said
of the terrible grandeur of the struggle which we have gone through, of the
vastness and formidable nature of the conspiracy against the life of our
republic, of the atrocious crimes of the conspirators, of the valor and
self-sacrificing spirit and unshaken constancy of the North, and of the
magnificent result which Providence has brought out of so much wickedness and
so much suffering, has been said already over and over.
Never, I think, was
any great moral lesson so powerfully inculcated by political history. What the
critics call poetic justice has been as perfectly accomplished as it could have
been in any imaginary series of events.
When I think of this
great conflict, and its great issues, my mind reverts to the grand imagery of
the Apocalypse — to the visions in which the messengers of God came down to do
his bidding among the nations, to reap the earth, ripe for the harvest, and
gather the spoil of the vineyards; to tread the wine-press, till it flows over
far and wide with blood; to pour out the phials of God's judgments upon the
earth, and turn its rivers into blood; and, finally, to bind the dragon, and
thrust him down into the bottomless pit.
Neither you nor I,
until this war began, thought that slavery would disappear from our country
until more than one generation had passed away; yet a greater than man has
taken the work in hand, and it is done in four years. It is a great thing to
have lived long enough to see this mighty evil wrenched up from our soil by the
roots and thrown into the flames.
SOURCE: Parke
Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, Volume 1, p. 227-8
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