Only a boy! and his father had said He never could let his youngest go; Two already were lying dead Under the feet of the trampling foe.
But after the evening’s work was done, And the frogs were loud in the meadow-swamp, Over his shoulder he slung his gun, And stealthily followed the foot-path damp;
Across the clover and through the wheat, With resolute heart and purpose grim; Though the dew was on his hurrying feet And the blind bat’s flitting startled him.
Thrice since then had the lanes been white, And the orchard sweet with apple-bloom; And now, when the cows came back at night, The feeble father drove them home.
For news had come to the lonely farm That three were lying where two had lain; And the old man’s tremulous, palsied arm Could never lean on a son’s again.
The summer days grew cool and late: He went for the cows when the work was done; But down the lane as he opened the gate He saw them coming, one by one:
Brindle, Ebony, Speckle, and Bess, Shaking their horns in the evening wind; Cropping the buttercups out of the grass; But who was it following close behind?
Loosely swung in the idle air An empty sleeve of army blue; And worn and pale, from the crisping hair, Looked out a face that the father knew.
The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes For the heart must speak when the lips are dumb; And under the silent evening skies Together they followed the cattle home.
[Sidenote: Some thoughts are not images.]
Who can fully appreciate these stanzas without picturing the landscape of clover, blue-eyed grass, meadow bars, river lane, cows moving homeward, and especially the boy with the shadow on his face, the two older brothers lying dead under the feet of the trampling foe? The subsequent parts of the poem lend themselves to the activity of the imagination, to a play of sympathy for the father seemingly bereft of all his sons, until on a summer day cool and late he sees fluttering in the wind an empty sleeve of army blue, beneath a face that he knew,—a scene which, if constructed by the imagination, cannot help stirring the emotional life of the reader and giving him proper tones and inflections in oral reading while more fully realizing the price paid in war for the saving of the nation. Very much of our thinking does not turn on images or mental pictures. We do not primarily think justice, law, kindness, mercy under the form of images, though by a secondary process we can throw these ideas into concrete examples and image them as occurring in life. Very many ideas cannot be made concrete in that way, as, for example, the ideas of infinity, eternity. Sometimes an indistinct or faded image does duty for the idea of horses in general, but in such cases the image is representative of the idea, and should not be confounded with the idea. Both are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas or images. Many thoughts are propositions and cannot be imaged at all.