Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/318

 Orations at Unveiling of Stonewall Jackson's Statue. 317

views on social, political and religious topics; and yet they find in the attraction which concentrates their regard upon one name, a place where their hearts unexpectedly touch each other and beat in strange unison.

It was this attractive moral excellence which, winning the love and admiration of the brave and pure on the other side of the sea, prompted them to enlist the genius of one of the greatest of modern sculptors in fashioning the statue we have met to inaugurate this day.

It is a singular and striking illustration of the world-wide appre- ciation of his character that the first statue of Jackson comes from abroad, and that while the monument to our own Washington, and the effigies of those who surround him, were erected by order of the Commonwealth, this memorial is the tribute of the admiration and love of those who never saw his face, and who were bound to him by no ties save those which a common sympathy for exalted worth establishes between the souls of magnanimous and heroic men. We accept this noble gilt all the more gratefully because it comes from men of kindred race and kindred heart, as the expression of their good-will and sympathy for our people as well as of their admiration for the genius and character of our illustrious hero.

We accept it as the visible symbol of the ancient friendship which existed in colonial times between Virginia and the mother country. We accept it as a prophecy of the incoming of British settlers to our sparsely populated territory, and hail it as a pleasing omen for the future that the rebuilding of our shattered fortunes should be aided by the descendants of the men who laid the foundations of this Com- monwealth. We accept it as a pledge of the peaceful relations which we trust will ever exist between Great Britain and the confederated empire formed by the United States of America.

In the first memorial discourse that was delivered after his lamented death, the question was asked, " How did it happen that a man who so recently was known to but a small circle, and to them only as a laborious, punctilious, humble-minded Professor in a Military Insti- tute, in so brief a space of time gathered around his name so much of the glory which encircles the name of Napoleon, and so much of the love that enshrines the memory of Washington?" And soon after, in the memoir which will go down to coming generations as the most faiihful portraiture of its subject and an enduring monument of the genius of its author, the inquiry was resumed, " How is it that this man, of all others least accustomed to exercise his own fancy or address that of others, has stimulated the imagination not only of his