Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/368

 860 Southern Historical Society Papers.

that Spirit" whose fruits are justice, mercy and truth, obedience to law, purity of life, sweet charity, and that self-sacrifice that crowns them all.

A noble life partakes of deity and endures. The test of its high kinship is that it stand for some noble thought impress upon our minds and hearts some one of these eternal elements, some attribute of that august character in whom alone they are perfectly developed each element eternal as His days are without end.

If there be presented for our consideration a character pre-emi- nently marked by but one of these ennobling features, this is the blood-mark by this we know the strain of immortality. Let but a spark of the eternal fire burn in the heart of man, there needs no vestal virgin to keep the lamp aflame. It is part of the light of the universe that cannot expire. Man struggles with imperfections. But a little leaven leavens the whole lump. The odor of the violet per- vades the garden. The sweet character of Cordelia makes the whole of King Lear a charm.

Full many a shining name, high written on the roll of fame, is doomed to be forgotten.

A monarch grown colossal in his might, boasts that the gods of the nations have not been able to save their people from his destroy- ing arm; a doubtful inscription on a crumbling stone is the record of his deeds. A Pharaoh of four thousand years ago, in the pride of his power, defies the God of Israel and deals hardly with His chosen. See, in this our day, his royal lineaments stripped of their cere- ments a spectacle for a gaping crowd to mock at.

An unconquerable phalanx, tramping steadily on, crushing its un- sparing way through crowding armies of peoples struggling to be free, bears a hero's banner to the border land beyond which there are no more worlds to conquer. Amid triumphial music, high seated at the feast with his worshippers around him, he

" Assumes the nod, Affects the god, And seems to shake the spheres."

In a mad debauch he dies, his right hand red with the blood of his friend; and for the world-empire that he founded, the map of the nations bears no trace that it ever existed.

The demon Corsican, with titanic force, shakes the foundations of empires. Like a destroying storm he crosses a continent; the wind- rows of the dead mark his passage through the nations. The groans