● ● ● show a certain verve and energy, while here and there a line or phrase leaps out with sudden power.48
It is worth noting that these verses were written in the very year that a Connecticut Yankee, Elihu Burritt, initiated the first world peace congress at Brussels. In her last years Mary Baker Eddy was to give warm support to the peace movement, but in 1848 she was caught up in the romantic heroism of war, although it was obviously the courage rather than the carnage that she admired.
The historian Francis Parkman, on board a British troopship a few years earlier, gave the soldier’s case with a sort of truculent male energy. Describing a Church of England service on shipboard, with “rough soldiers and sailors” making the responses in the litany, he wrote:
A becoming horror of dissenters, especially Unitarians, prevails everywhere. No one cants here of temperance reform, or of systems of diet—eat, drink, and be merry is the motto everywhere, and a stronger and hardier race of men . . . never laughed at the doctors. Above all there is no canting of peace. A wholesome system of coercion is manifest in all directions—thirty-two pounders looking over the bows—piles of balls on deck—muskets and cutlasses hung up below—the red jackets of marines—and the honest prayer that success should crown all these warlike preparations, yesterday responded to by fifty voices. There was none of the new-fangled suspicion that such belligerent petitions might be averse to the spirit of a religion that inculcates peace as its foundation. And I firmly believe that there was as much hearty faith and worship in many of those men as in any feeble consumptive wretch at home, who when smitten on one cheek literally turns the other likewise—instead of manfully kicking the offender into the gutter.49
48 Another poem contains an interesting phrase in regard to war:
Invincible valor their Masonry teacheth,
Whose bosoms were bared for our country’s defence;
’Twill humanize war where its influence reacheth,
And Discord to Harmony yield its offence.
Mary M. Glover, “Lines, Suggested on reading an account of the Masonic meeting of Generals Quitman and Shields U.S.A., at a Festival of the Fraternity in Charleston, S.C.,” The Freemasons’ Monthly Magazine, 1 March 1848, p. 152.
49 Journal entry quoted in Howard Doughty, Francis Parkman (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 69–70.