No fresh flowers bloom in these dreary spots; no merry
birds twitter there; no streamlets lapse sweetly with musical murmurs
beneath the waterflags or the drooping boughs of trees. See! the
blighted and withered plants are like the deadly nightshade--true
flowers of war, blooming, or trying to bloom, on graves! Hear the
voices of the few birds--they are sad and discordant! See the
trees--they are gnarled, spectral, and torn by cannon-balls. Listen!
The stream yonder is not limpid and mirthful like other streams. You
would say that it is sighing as it steals away, soiled and ashamed. The
images it has mirrored arouse its horror and make it sad. The serene
surface has not given back the bright forms of children, laughing and
gathering the summer flowers on its banks. As it sneaks like a culprit
through the scarred fields of battle, it washes bare the bones of the
dead in crumbling uniforms--bringing, stark and staring, to the upper
air once more, the blanched skeleton and the grinning skull.
Names of woe, at whose utterance the heart shudders, the blood curdles!
Accursed localities where the traveller draws back, turning away in
horror! All the world is dotted with them; everywhere they make the
sunlight black. Among them, none is gloomier, or instinct with a more
nameless horror, than the once insignificant village of Gettysburg.
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