  decoration My dear Friend,— Indignation at my dedicating this book to you will be useless, since I am at present three thousand miles out of your reach. Moreover, this dedication is not intended as a public monument to our friendship;—I know too much for that. If that were the case, we should manage to quarrel even at this distance, I am quite confident, before the proof-sheets had left the press. But I can dedicate it to you alone of all my college friends, because you and I were brought so especially into the atmosphere of the man who inspired me to undertake it,—the man to whom, under God, I shall owe most of what grace and culture I may ever acquire. You and I know his wonderful unselfishness, his tender sympathy, his exquisite delicacy of thought and life, as well as others know his wit and his scholarship. It was while I was writing the opening pages of this story that the But, such as it is, you and a few others will know what I mean by it; and that point gained, the rest matters little. If by it one single heart is made to throb, even for an instant, with love of this country, of which we can never be too mindful nor too proud, my object will be gained. And now I commend to you this book. Ever your friend, FRED. W. LORING. To Mr. Wm. W. Chamberlin. “At dawn,” he said, “I bid them all farewell, To go where bugles blow and rifles gleam.” And with the waking thought asleep he fell, And wandered into dream. A great hot plain from lake to ocean spread, Through it a level river slowly drawn: He moved with a vast crowd, and at its head Streamed banners like the dawn. Then came a blinding flash, a deafening roar, And dissonant cries of terror and dismay; Blood trickled down the river’s reedy shore, And with the dead he lay. The morn broke in upon his solemn dream, And still with steady pulse and deepening eye, “Where bugles call,” he said, “and rifles gleam, I follow, though I die.” TWO COLLEGE FRIENDS. decoration “‘At dawn,’ he said, ‘I bid them all farewell, To go where bugles blow and rifles gleam;’ And with the waking thought asleep he fell, And wandered into dream.” |
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