Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 41.djvu/24

 12 fathers did not make him small. The brightness of his talent was but the adumbration of his soul. His name was not an asset to be counted in the market, and the gilded offer that he should sell it was instantly rejected. Scrupulously exact about money, for him wealth had no charms, and no financial scandal tarnishes his name.

By heritage and training a soldier and in love with his profession the highest office in the Federal army was declined for the sake of duty. The seductive voice of ambition awoke no unholy echo in his soul, but when like a flute played under a huge bell duty sang its soft, sweet note beneath his fine mixed metal, then did his great soul tremble, then his massive character with myriad waves concurrent answered in low, soft, unison, for he felt that a sound of the eternal truth had reached him, and he was not disobedient to the heavenly message.

Free from petulence, never querulous, unshadowed by a vice, a close examination of his character fails to find a disappointing feature. He was not a deformity but a harmony.

Lovingly he cared for a frail and feeble mother and this filial service* may have been the loom that wove into his courage the golden thread of gentleness. But the crown of all his virtues was his simple faith in God. His religion was free from ostentation, was never on parade, but was as natural as breathing and shaped his daily life.

Rough was the path he was called upon to tread, yet was he equal to the trial. In the land which his forebears had settled and whose liberty was won by his fathers, without a loss of dignity and without an impropriety he saw the confiscation of the ancestral acres of his wife. Half a decade after the war he died a "prisoner on parole," the citizenship taken from him being given to his manumitted slaves.

The last years of his life were spent amid the ruin of the civilization of the South, yet did he not faint in this day of adversity, for his strength was not small. Not often do the old walk without stumbling through the ruin where once their palace stood, yet never in the palace was his foot more sure than during those last years when all his way was through a desolation. Bitterness