A charming little lady, the front elevation of whose name
is Stella, takes pen in hand and gives the Icon. a red-hot
"roast" for having intimated that Platonic Love, so-called, is
a pretty good thing for respectable women to let alone.
Judged by the amount of caloric she generates, Stella must
be a star of the first magnitude, or even an entire
constellation. She "believes in the pure, passionless love
described by Plato as sometimes existing between the
sexes--the affinities of mind as distinguished from the
carnal lusts of matter," and opines that the Apostle "must
be gross indeed not to comprehend this philosophic and
highly satisfactory companionship."
"Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky."
I plead guilty and cast myself upon the mercy of the court.
I sorrowfully admit that my aestheticism is not eighteen
karats fine, but mixed with considerable slag. When I
should have been acquiring the higher culture, I was either
playing hookey or planting hogs. Instead of being fed on
the transcendental philosophy of Plato, I was stuffed with
mealy Irish spuds and home-grown "punkin" pie. When I
should have been learning to relish pate de foie
gras and love my neighbor's wife in a purely passionless
way, I was following one of McCormick's patents around a
forty-acre field or arguing a point of ethics with a
contumacious mule. That I am unable to appreciate that
Platonic yearning of soul to soul, that deep calling
unto deep on which Stella dotes, is my misfortune
rather than my fault. It appears to me too much like voting
the Prohibition ticket or playing poker with Confederate
currency. When I love a woman I love her up one side and
down t'other. I may be an uncultured and barbaric noodle,
but I want to get hold of her and bite her neck. I want to
cuddle her sunny curls on my heaving shirt-front when I talk
to her about affinities. I believe with Tennyson in the spirits
rushing together at the touching of the lips, and I just let
'em rush. Men may esteem women and enjoy their society
with never a thought of sex. I have many female friends,
some white-haired gran'dames, some mere girls in short
dresses. But for their kindly interest and encouragement I
would have cast aside the faber and fled to the desert long
ago. The friendship of a noble woman is life's holiest
perfume; but that is not the affinity of souls, the
supernatural spooning, the Platonic yum-yum for which fair
Stella pleads. Love, as I understand the term, is to
friendship's non-consuming flame what the fierce glare of
the noonday sun is to the mild radiance of the harvest
moon. It is something which makes two people of opposite
sexes absolutely necessary to each other. It is a glory in
which the soul is bathed, an almost savage melody that
beats within the blood. It is--O dammed; it's that which
transforms a snub-nosed dairy maid into a Grecian
goddess, a bench-legged farmer boy into a living Apollo
Belvedere. "Love is love forevermore"--differing in degree,
but never in kind. The Uranian is but the nobler nature of
the Pandemian Venus, not another entity. Love is not
altogether of the earth earthy. It is born of the spirit as well
as of the flesh, of the perfume as of the beauty of the great
red rose. Few of those women who have led captive the
souls of the intellectual Titans of the world could boast of
wondrous beauty. The moment man passes the pale
of savagery he demands something more than mere
physical perfection in a companion. Purity, Gentleness,
Dignity--such are the three graces of womanhood that
ofttimes make Cupid forgive a shapeless bosom and adore
a homely face. The love of a parent for a child is the
purest affection of which we can conceive; yet is the child
the fruition of a love that lies not ever in the clouds.
Platonic affection, so-called, is but confluent smallpox
masquerading as measles. Those who have it may not
know what ails 'em; but they've got a simple case of
"spoons" all the same. If Stella were "my dear heart's
better part," and tried to convince me that she felt a purely
Platonic affection for some other fellow, I'd apply for a writ
of injunction or lay for my transcendental rival with a
lignumvitae club loaded to scatter. Nobody could
convince me that the country was secure. The Platonic
racket is being sadly overworked in swell society. Like
charity, it covers a multitude of sins. Married women go
scouting around at all hours and in all kinds of places with
Platonic lovers, until the "old man" feeds a few slugs into a
muzzle-loading gun and lets the Platonism leak through
artificial holes in the hide of some gay gallant. When
madame must have her beaux, and maids receive attention
from married men, there's something decayed in the moral
Denmarks. Mrs. Tilton thought she felt a Platonic affection
for Henry Ward Beecher--was simply worshiping at the
shrine of his genius; but she made as bad a mess of it as
though she had called her complaint concupiscence. Even
here in Texas, where we do preserve a faint adumbration of
the simplicity and virtue of ye olden time, it is no
uncommon thing to see a chipper married female, who
moves in the "best society," flitting about with some fellow
who's recognized, as the servants say, as her "steady
company." But as we have improved on the
Pompeiian "house of joy," so have we added to the French
fashion of married flirtation a new and interesting feature.
The French allow maids but little liberty so far as male
companionship is concerned; but we remove the bridle
altogether, and while the matron flirts with the bachelor, the
maid appropriates the lonesome benedict. All the old social
laws have been laid on the shelf and life rendered a
veritable go-as-you-please. In real life there is no "pure
Platonic affection," whatever may betide in fiction. No man
waits upon another's wife, provides her with carriages and
cut flowers, opera tickets and wine suppers with never a
suspicion of sex, and no maid who values her virtue will
receive marked attentions from a married man. When a
virgin finds an "affinity" she should steer it against a
marriage contract at the earliest possible moment; when a
wife discovers one to whom she is not wedded she should
employ a bread and water diet to subdue her "natural
super-naturalism"-- and reinforce her religion with a season
of penitence and prayer.
* * *
TIENS TA FOI.
Though thorny the pathway 'neath our feet,
Though nothing in life be left that's sweet;
Though friends prove faithless in trial's hours
And love a curst and poisonous flower;
Though Belial stalk in priestly gown
And virtue's reward is fortune's frown;
Though true hearts bleed and the coward slave
Tramples in dust the fallen brave;
Think not the unworthy acts of men
Will 'scape the recording angel's pen;
The sword of God, in ruin and wraith,
Will surely fall! Oh, cling to thy faith!
Though worldly wise say it cannot be
That there's a heaven for thee and me;
Though logic's banner they have unfurled
And by its cold light now view the world,
Calling High God to the courts of man
To be judged by human reason's span,
And failing to grasp the power divine
Will blindly assert: "It doth not shine";
Thy mother was wiser far than they
In twilight hour when she knelt to pray,
A radiant light on her sweet face
From Eternal God's high dwelling-place.
Lo here! lo here th' false prophets cry,
Pointing out new paths unto the sky,
Far pleasanter than our fathers trod
With bleeding feet in the fear of God;
While Atheists laugh our faith to scorn,
And say that no man of woman born
Ever pierced the evil or caught a gleam
Of the mystic land beyond life's stream;
That our fondest hopes, our prayers and sighs
For life eternal beyond the skies,
Are superstitions conceived in fear
And cherished by priest and lying seer.
The martyr's blood, the penitent's tears,
The inspired word of Judea's seers,
The name of God on the sacred mount,
The river that poured from rocky fount
In the burning sands beneath the rod,
Obedient to the will of God;
The prayers and sighs in Gethsemane,
The red tide gushing on Calvary,
The radiant smile when life is done
Of saint that tells that heaven is won--
Shall we say 'tis all a priestly lie
And like soulless beasts lie down to die?
Ah, better 'twould be to ride in mail
A weary quest for the Holy Grail;
Wield Saxon steel 'gainst Saracen sword
Around the sepulcher of our Lord;
See Cross and Crescent and mailed hand
All plashed with blood in that sacred land,
Than doubt that heaven e'er shed its light
Deep into this world's long troublous night;
That God hears our prayers, knows all our pains,
That earthly sorrows are heavenly gains,
That the grave's the gate to lasting life,
Unsullied by sorrow, pain and strife.
Oh, better worship at pagan shrine;
Or, prophet of Islam, e'en at thine;
To seek Nirvana in Buddhist lore,
Or pray to Isis on Afric's shore;
Better the dark, mysterious rites
Of Ceres on Elusian heights;
Better the Gueber's fierce God of fire--
Oh, better to wake the trembling lyre
To any Savior than to be hurled
Godless and hopeless out of the world;
To madly plunge in death's dark river,
Lost to life and heaven forever.
In dark seas where the whirlpool rages
Stands the eternal Rock of Ages;
Amid dangers dire, 'mid wreck and wraith
God plants the banner of Christian faith.
Unworthy the sailor whose heart doth fail
When the God of storms rides on the gale;
Coward the soldier who shuns the grave,
And thrice accursed the trembling slave
Who in life's battles, darkest hour
Renounces God and denies His power.
Then Tiens ta Foi through the bitter strife!
O cling to the cross--through death to life!
* * *
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Of a recent edition of Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero
Worship," it is said that 100,000 copies are already sold.
The work has been on the market many years, and this
continued popularity is indeed encouraging. It argues that
the taste for the legitimate, the sane in literature, has not
yet been drowned in the septic sea of fin de siecle
slop--that, despite the enervating influence of an all-
pervasive sensationalism, or sybaritism, there be still minds
capable of relishing the rugged, strong enough to digest the
mental pabulum furnished by a really masculine writer.
Carlyle ranges like an archangel through the universe of
intellect, overturning mountains to see how they are made--
now cleaving the empyrean with strong and steady wing,
now shearing clear down to the profoundest depths of
Ymir's Well at the foundations of the world. That his
followers continue to increase argues well for the age, for
he is a man whom weaklings should avoid if they
would not be sawed in twain by mountain chains, forever
lost in pathless limboes or drowned in the unmeasured
deep. Even the strongest must perforce part company with
him at times, else follow with the eye of faith, for his path
oft leads up into that far region where mortals can scarce
breathe, over Walpurgis' peaks, through bottomless chasms
and along the filmy edge of clouds.
The admirers of Carlyle--may their tribe increase!--are
indignant because one Edmund Gosse, in his introduction
to the late edition of "Heroes and Hero Worship," alludes to
the lion of modern literature as "an undignified human
being, growling like an ill-bred collie dog." They take Mr.
Gosse too seriously--dignify him with their displeasure.
James Anthony Froude--a literary gun of much heavier
caliber than Mr. Gosse appears to us from this passing
glimpse--once wrote, if I remember aright, in a similar vein
of the grizzled sage; but the unkind critique has been
forgotten, and its author is fast following it into oblivion,
while the shade of Carlyle looms ever larger, towering
already above the Titans of his time, reaching even to the
shoulder of Shakespeare! Gosse? Who is this
presumptuous fellow who would take Carlyle in tutelage,
foist himself upon the attention of the public by making a
peep-show of the great essayist's faults? There is, or was,
a pugilist named Gesse, or Goss; but as he did not deal
foul blows to the dead, this must be a different breed of
dogs. Sometime since there lived a little Englishman
named William Edmund, or Edmund William Gosse, or
Goss; but I had hitherto supposed that, becoming disgusted
with himself, he crawled off and died. As I remember him,
he was a kind of half-baked poetaster or he-bulbul, a
Johannes Factotum in the province of dilettanteism, a
universal Smart Alec who knew less about more
things than any other animal in England. He was one of
those persistently pestiferous insects tersely called by
Carlyle "critic flies"--a descendant of that placed by
aesop in St. Paul's cupola. They presume to judge all
things, great and small, by their "half-inch vision"--take the
measure of cathedrals and interpret to the world the
meaning of brainy men! Unfortunately, the "critic fly" is
confined to no one nation--is what might be called, in
vigorous Texanese, an all-pervading dam-nuisance.
Mounted upon a mole, pimple or other cutaneous
imperfection of an intellectual colossus, it complacently
smooths its wings and explains, with a patronizing air, that
the big 'un isn't half bad; but sagely adds that had it been
consulted, his too visible imperfections would have been
eradicated. We dislike to see an insect leave its periods
and semi-colons on the immortal marble; but it were idle to
grow angry with a Gosse. This must be the English literary
exquisite whom Americans have hitherto incidentally heard
bellowing before the tent of this or the other giant and
taking tickets--I mean the prig, not the pug. He is
comparatively youthful yet, and can, on occasion, digest a
good dinner. Perchance when he is well past four-score,
worn with long years of labor compared with which the
slavery of the bagne were a blessing, and half-dead with
dyspepsia, he too, will "growl like a collie dog"; but never a
copper will the great world care whether he grumbles or
grins. Should he even get hydrophobia, that fact would
scarce become historic. The public marks and magnifies a
great man's foibles, but forgets both the little fellow and his
faults. Jeanjean may hide from the battle in a hollow log,
and none hear of it; but let a Demosthenes lose his shield
and the world cackles over it for two-and-twenty centuries.
To digress for a moment, I believe the story of
Demosthenes' cowardice as damnable a lie as that
relating to Col. Ingersoll's surrender. Even in his day
human vermin sought to wreck with falsehood those they
feared. The world--unwisely I think--interests itself in the
personality of a genius, and somewhat impudently invades
his privacy. A young man may muster up sufficient moral
courage to lie to his callers, and thus preserve the
proprieties; but an aged valetudinarian who wants to get
into a quiet nook and nurse himself, may show scant
courtesy--even brush the "critic fly" of the genus Gosse out
of doors with a hickory broom.
Carlyle belonged to "the irritable race of poets," albeit he
seldom imitated Pope's bad example and tortured his
rugged ideas into oleaginous rhyme. There is a strange
wild melody in all his work--what he would call "harmony in
discord" suggesting that super-nervous temperament which
is inseparable from the highest genius, and which
degenerates so easily into acute neurosis--that "madness"
to which wit is popularly supposed to be so "near allied."
Such natures are aeolian harps acted upon, not by "the
viewless air," but by a subtler, more impalpable power,
which comes none know whence, and goes none know
whither--one moment yielding soft melodies as of an angel's
lute borne across sapphire seas, the next wailing like some
lost soul or shrieking like Eumenides. The "self-poised,"
the "well-balanced" man, of whom you can safely predict
what he will do under given conditions; the man who never
bitterly disappoints you and makes you weep for very pity
of his weakness, will never appall you by exhibitions of his
strength. He may possess constructive talent, but never
that creative power which we call genius because it
suggests the genii. "No man is a hero to his valet," says
the adage. Carlyle assumes this to be the fault of the
latter--due to sawdust or other cheap filling in the
head of the menial. Yet, may not the valet be wiser in this
matter than the world? The hero, the greatest genius, is
not always aflame with celestial fire, impelled by that
mysterious power which comes from "beyond the clouds"--
may be, for most part, the commonest kind of clay, a
creature in nowise to be worshiped. The eagle, which
soars so proudly at the sun, will return to its eyrie with
drooping wing; the condor, whose shadow falls from afar on
Chimborazo's alabaster brow, cannot live always in the
empyrean, a thing ethereal, and back to earth is no better
than a carrion crow. To genius more than to aught else,
perhaps, distance lends enchantment. While we see only
the bold outline of the Titan, we are content to worship--
nay, insist upon it; but having scrutinized him inch by inch
with a microscope, we realize that familiarity breeds
contempt. Well does Christ say that a prophet is not
without honor save in his own country--which is the origin of
the hero and valet adage. I cannot understand why the
world insists upon seeing le Grand Monarque in his night-
cap and Carlyle in his chimney corner. With the harem of
Byron and the drunken orgies of Burns, the poaching of
Shakespeare and the vanity of Voltaire it has nothing to
do--should content itself with what they have freely given it,
the intellectual heritage they have left to humanity, and not
pry into those frailties which they fain would hide. If
Goldsmith "wrote like an angel and talked like a fool," it
was because when he wielded the pen there was only a
wise man present, and all are affected more or less by the
company they keep. We care not whether the gold in our
coffers was mined by saint or sinner, so that it be standard
coin; then what boots it what manner of men stole from
heaven that Promethean fire which surges in the poet's
song, leaps in lightning-flash from the orator's lips, or
becomes "dark with excess of bright" in Carlyle's
Natural-Supernaturalism? Judge ye the work, and let
the workman "growl like a collie dog" if it ease his dyspepsia!
That Carlyle was "an undignified human being," I can well
believe; for he was the wisest of his day, and dignity is the
distinguishing characteristic of the dodo and the donkey. If
Mr. Gosse esteems it so highly, he might procure a pot of
glue and adorn his vermiform appendix with a few peacock
feathers, else take lessons in posturing from the turkey-
gobbler or editor of the Houston Post. Had Carlyle been
born a long-eared ass, he might have been fully approved--
if not altogether appreciated--by Gosse, Froude and other
"critic flies." When Doctor Samuel Johnson was told that
Boswell proposed to write his life, he threatened to prevent
it by taking that of his would-be biographer. It were curious
to consider what "crabbed old Carlyle" would have done
had he suspected the danger of falling into the hands of a
literary backstairs Mrs. Grundy like Edmund Gosse! In his
"Heroes and Hero Worship" he treated his colossi far
otherwise than he in turn has been treated by Gosse and
Froude. He first recognized the fact that they were colossi,
and no fit subject for the microscope. We hear nothing
from him to remind us of Lemuel Gulliver's disgust with the
yawning pores and unseemly blotches of the epidermis of
that monster Brobdingnagian maid who set him astride her
nipple. He reverenced them because they possessed more
than the average of that intellectual strength which is not
only of God, but is God; then considered their life-work as a
whole, its efficient cause and ultimate consequence. He
does not appear to have thought to inquire whether they
had dyspepsia, and how it affected them, being engrossed
in that more important question, viz., what ideas they were
possessed withal, how wrought out, and what part
these emanant volitions of the lords of intellect
played in the mighty drama of Human Life.
It is not my present purpose to review Carlyle's literary
labors--that were like crowding the Bard of Avon into a
magazine article. For 300 years the world has been
studying the latter, and is not yet sure that it understands
him; yet Shakespeare is to Carlyle what a graded turnpike
is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly
with the visible; the latter with the intangible. The first
tells us what men did; the last seeks to learn why they did it.
Carlyle is the prince of critics. He is often lenient to a
fault, but seldom deceived--"looks quite through the shows of
things into the things themselves." Uriel, keenest of vision
'mid all the host of heaven, is his guardian angel. To follow
him into the sanctuaries of great souls and become familiar
with all their hopes and fears; to pass the portals of master
minds and watch the gradual evolution of great ideas in
these cyclopean workshops; to mount the hill of Mirza and
from it view the Tide of Time rushing ever into the illimitable
Sea of Eternity, and comprehend the meaning of that
mighty farce-tragedy enacted on the Bridge of Life, were
scarce so easy as listening to the buzzing of the "critic fly"
or dawdling over a French novel on a summer's day.
Carlyle is frequently called a "mystic," and mystagogue he
certainly is--a man who interprets mysteries. If the average
reader urge that his interpretation is too oft an obscurum
per obscurius, he might reply, in the language of that other
woefully "undignified" and shockingly impolite human
being, Dr. Johnson: "I am bound to find you in reasons,
Sir, but not in brains." Carlyle was regarded by those
writers of his day who clung to and revered the time-worn
ruts, as chief of the "Spasmodic School," the members whereof
were supposed to be distinguished by "a stained and unnatural
style."
This "School," which was satirized by Aytoun while editor
of Blackwood's Magazine, was thought to include
Tennyson, Gilfillan and other popular authors of the time. I
incline to the view that no writer of whom we have any
knowledge exhibits less affectation in the matter of style
than does the subject of this essay. It is rugged and
massive; but so is his mind. It were impossible to imagine
the author of "Sartor Resartus" and "The French
Revolution" expressing himself in the carefully rounded
periods of Macaulay, whose prose is half poetry, and
whose poetry is all prose. Carlyle seems to care precious
little what kind of vehicle he uses for the conveyance of
ideas so long as it does not break down. All his labor
"smells of the lamp"; but "the midnight oil"--of which our
modern "ready writers" evidently use so little--was
consumed in considering what to say rather than how to
say it. Not even Shakespeare possesses so extensive a
vocabulary. The technical terms of every profession and
subdivision of science come trippingly to his tongue. But
even the dictionary is not large enough for him, and he
extends it this way and that, his daring neology creating
consternation among the critic flies and other ephemera.
He wrote as he thought, hence his style could not be other
than natural. That of Aytoun was formed in the schools,
principally modeled by masters--made to fit a procrustean
bed--and was, therefore, eminently artificial. If we apply the
term "unnatural" to the matter instead of the manner of
Carlyle and Tennyson, then away with genius, for
intellectual originality is tabooed!--no man is privileged to
think his own thoughts. That is the law nowadays nowhere
except in the sanctum of the Gal-Dal News, where Col.
Jenkins takes the editorial eyas and teaches it to soar ln
exact imitation of himself.
Whether by the "Spasmodic" method or otherwise, Carlyle
dragged more true orients out of the depths than did any of
his contemporaries; and that is saying much, for "there
were giants in those days," and they were neither few nor
far between. The intellectual glory of the first half of the
present century was scarce eclipsed by the Elizabethan
era. It was in very truth "a feast of reason and a flow of
soul." Goethe and "Jean Paul" were putting the finishing
touches to their work while Carlyle, then a young man, was
striving to interpret these so strange appearances to the
English-speaking world, to hammer some small appreciation
of German literature into the autotheistic British head. Tom
Moore, sweetest of mere singers, and Lord Byron, prince of
poets, were but five and seven years respectively his
seniors. He saw the beginning and the end of their literary
labors, as of those of Macaulay and Mill, Darwin, Disraeli
and Dickens. Much of his best work was done ere the
death of Walter Scott, and he might have played as a
school boy with the ill-fated Shelley. He had just begun his
long life-labor when Longfellow and Tennyson, Hugo and
Wagner came upon the scene, and together they wrought
wisely and well in that mighty seed-field which is the world!
What a galaxy of intellectual gods!--now all gone, returned
home to High Olympus--the weird land left to the Alfred
Austins, the William Dean Howells and the Ian McLarens!
Gone, but not forgotten; yet the world will in time forget--
even the amaranthine flowers must fade. Of them all we
see but one star that blazes the brighter as the years run
on, and that one long mistaken for a mere erratic comet--
sans substance, or unformed nebulae hanging like a
splotch of semi-luminous vapor in a great void. Year by
year the voice of Carlyle rings clearer and clearer from the
"Eternal Silence." And as we listen with rapt
attention to the music of the spheres becoming
audible, intelligible to our dull ear--the Waterloo and Lisbon
earthquakes, the Revolutions and the Warring Religions, all
the glory and shame, the wild loves and bitter hatreds of
humanity--even Birth and Death--but minor notes in the
Grand Symphony, the Harmony of Infinitude, the little man
who has undertaken the management of the microphone,
without suspecting its significance, distracts us with the
unwished for and utterly useless information that the Voice
coming from beyond Time and Space, out of the
Everlasting Deep, once "growled like a collie dog!"
* * *
RESQUIESCAT IN PACE.
The mortal remains of Jefferson Davis, for four eventful
years president of the Southern Confederacy, are now en
route to their last resting place in Hollywood cemetery in
the city of Richmond. New Orleans, the metropolis of the
sunny south-land, surrenders, with sighs and tears, the dust
of the distinguished dead to the keeping of the old capital of
the Confederacy. There, where died the dream of a new
nation; there, where the dashing Cavalier made his last
desperate stand against the stubborn Puritan; there, where
the cause was irretrievably lost,--where the stars and bars
made obeisance to the stars and stripes and the "gray
gigantic host" faded from the tragic stage of the world, will
be laid the dust of our honored dead to await the judgment
day.
Near the grave of Davis will spring a massive monument,
which will forever remain a landmark in American history,--
aye, in the mighty epic of the world! More imposing
cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have
charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have
aspired to kiss the clouds; but to the student of mankind
none were more significant, to the historian none more
interesting, to the poet none will appeal more powerfully
through the long ages yet to be. It will be a new and
grander Memnon in masonry, ever sounding celestial music
for him that hath ears to hear, when smitten by the golden
shafts of Justice's shining orb, when gilded with the
celestial radiance of Love and Charity.
To-morrow the Southern people will, with tender hands and
loving hearts, finally commit their dead chieftain to the care
of the impartial historian. May another Plutarch arise to
paint him as he was--nothing extenuating, naught set down
in malice. May another Macaulay come forth from the
fecund womb of the mighty future to add to the charm of
history the music of his voice.
When the generation that knew and loved Davis shall have
passed from earth; when those who idealized him shall
have crossed the narrow boundaries of Time into Eternity's
shoreless sea; when those brave souls who set their
breasts against the bayonet shall one and all be gathered
into the great hand of God; when those who saw in him the
incarnation of a principle in whose defense they had
pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor,
shall be no longer with us to warp our better judgment,
Jefferson Davis will sink to the ordinary level as a
statesman and a soldier. It will be seen that his intellect
was of the commonplace, his judgment ofttimes faulty,--that
he can have no claim on the bays that lie ever green upon
the brow of genius; but his dauntless courage, his devotion
to his people, his purity of purpose--in a word, his American
manhood--may well defy the crucial test of time and the
analysis of the most exacting historian.
The honors which the South pays to the memory of
Jefferson Davis are as unique as they are pathetic.
He stood for the division of the Union, and the South
rejoices that we are one nation and one people. He stood
for the perpetuation of human slavery, and the South
rejoices that the foul curse hath been lifted from her
forever. Intensely loyal to the Union to-day, she bedews
with her tears and covers with her rarest flowers the bier of
him who devoted his best energies to destroy it. The
successful revolutionary leader is always lionized; the
patriot who strives and fails, remains dear to the people so
long as his cause awakes a responsive echo in their hearts;
but where hitherto in the great world's history has chieftain
been thus honored, when even those who bore the battle's
brunt give thanks to God that his flag went down in defeat
lo rise no more forever? It is the grandest tribute ever paid
to American manhood.
* * *
CORONATION OF THE CZAR.