_Sept. 28, '79_.--So General Grant, after circumambiating the world,
has arrived home again, landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the
ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an
illustration--his life--of the capacities of that American individuality
common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering "what the people can
see in Grant" to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no
doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and
scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional
eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average western
farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances,
perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic
responsibilities, (history has presented none more trying, no born
monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy,) may steer his way
fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself
with credit year after year--command over a million armed men--fight
more than fifty pitch'd battles--rule for eight years a land larger than
all the kingdoms of Europe combined--and then, retiring, quietly (with
a cigar in his mouth) make the promenade of the whole world, through its
courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest
glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the
portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people
like--and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How
those old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man--no
art, no poetry--only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to
do, what devolv'd upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer
of Illinois--general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with
itself, in the war of attempted secession--President following, (a task
of peace, more difficult than the war itself)--nothing heroic, as the
authorities put it--and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies,
seem to have concentrated upon him.