ABSTRACT
"Through our great good fortune," writes Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in one of the speeches that follows, "in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing." The experience of the Civil War was the maturing force in Holmes's life. Holmes's speeches on the Civil War, characterized by grace and restrained warmth and a felicity of phrase, contain some of the best of his writing. At least, and perhaps as long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle, and he has to take the chances of war. If it is our business to fight, the book for the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. From the beginning children of the North, life has seemed a place hung about by dark mists, out of which come the pale shine of dragon's scales and the cry of fighting men.
