The Battle of Antietam.

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          It has not unfrequently been seen that two powerful men would wrestle together and one bring the other down with a heavy fall. The two would quickly rise again, but instead of renewing the struggle, one would turn away in silence from the ring. To the eye it might seem at the moment that no hurt was done, but that a like contest might any day be renewed between them. All a mistake, it has often proved. Follow the retiring contestant and learn perhaps that his singular and unexplained withdrawal from the struggle was his involuntary obedience to the summons of death -- that the shock of the fall had ruptured a vital blood-vessel, or stunned the brain with a death-blow; and he was moving off literally a dead man, in sole and silent procession to his foredoomed funeral. We believe it is such a case we witness on the Upper Potomac to-day. It was a battle of the giants we had there on Wednesday last. The victorious heroes of Fair Oaks and Malvern Hill, where the Union cause was baptized in fire and blood, met the battle-tried hosts that carried Gaines' Hill by storm, and twice sowed with our dead the plains of Manassas. Each army had its best loved leaders, each had its ranks full, each felt that the world watched the struggle, and that all mankind had an interest in the result. Never in all history was a more honorable battle fought. No stragglers limped or crept to the rear. No column gave way save when blown back by the whirlwind of flame from the cannon's mouth. No regiment, however stript by leaden hail of its officers, was left without a man still worthy to lead it, and no officer was left alone in the field to deplore that he had led cowards to the fight. From sunrise to sunsetting, with encroachment at each end of the day on darkness, the earth shook under the mighty battle, and at night the panting combatants rested on the field. The day after, the Union heroes were the declared victors; and in the shades of evening, the vanquished rebels retired from the ground whereon they had provoked the contest, and which they had advertised their own people and the world they meant permanently to hold! The retreat of the rebel army is not, its defeat only: it is its demoralization and its death-blow. It marches away as the doomed wrestler does -- not to study a renewal of his grapple, but because his heart is sick of the arena from which death summons him; he would "turn his face to the wall" and die! How can the flower of Southern chivalry -- the aggregation of Southern strength -- the personification of its enthusiasm and daring -- meet its appalled Government and people, in its retreat from its supposed victorious invasion? What "spring" is there in all the Southern resources for war to "take up the recoil " of this terrible disaster? An advancing army may gather food and forage from an extended agricultural district, for it commands its own time and rate of progress. A beaten and retreating army can do no such thing; for its movements are compulsory. The goading of artillery in pursuit gives no rest; it has no regard to hunger of horses or men; its order is that of a cruel master, "Onward -- onward -- to the death." We have citizens who bewailed the war for freedom as almost lost, a short time ago, so much did they distrust the skill and power of our armed resistance to rebellion. Some of them revived but little when the news of Wednesday stirred the hearts of patriots with confidence and joy. When Thursday night found the enemy defeated and flying, the doubters became suddenly fierce to desperation. They demanded, in the name of an outraged country, why the fruits of the grandest victory of modern wars had not been reaped in the capture of 150,000 prisoners, with arms in their hands! We shall not now argue this matter. We have the confidence to declare the battle of Antietam one of the greatest ever fought -- its victory substantial and its fruits imperishable. Its effects will be seen and felt in the destinies of the Nation for centuries to come.

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