began the revival of interest in
Nathan Hale's short but splendid career that is still gathering strength
and will eventually establish his name among those of the bravest
American patriots.

CHAPTER VIII

TRIBUTES TO NATHAN HALE

When Captain Montressor told Hale's dismayed friends of the terrible
doom that had befallen their comrade, it must have seemed as if all the
influence Hale might have had in a prolonged life, all that could come
to such a man, had been sacrificed. We must not blame them if the
question involuntarily rose in their hearts, "Why such waste? Why was
such an influence so permanently destroyed?" Curiously enough, many
years passed with little special notice by the public of Hale's death.
But the leaven of patriotism works, even though slowly, and step by step
Hale was coming to his own. Little by little the memory of his sacrifice
for his country, and the fact that he had left words that should glow
with increasing splendor, took possession of those who had ears to hear
and hearts to remember.

Old Linonia in Yale did not forget the splendid boy, once its
Chancellor, who died as he had lived. Linonia's records still bear, in
clear and perfect lines, reports his hand had written when he was its
most assiduous member. Others might have forgotten him; Linonia had not.

On its one-hundredth anniversary, July 27, 1853,--Commencement
Week,--the poet of the occasion was Francis Miles Finch, Yale, 1846,
later Judge of the New York Court of Appeals. As poet, Mr. Finch of
course recalled many former members of the society. He ended with a poem
on Nathan Hale in which he held his listeners spellbound as stanza after
stanza, magnetic in proportion to their truthful beauty, fell from his
lips.

There has been a further service to his country by Judge Finch. His own
character has been graven into two different poems,--the one just
referred to, and one that he wrote later. The latter poem had,
undoubtedly, a powerful influence in causing our national Decoration Day
to be celebrated throughout the United States.

The story of this poem is interesting. In a town in Mississippi certain
Southern women went on a spring day, soon after the close of the Civil
War, to cover with flowers the graves of their beloved dead. The
gracious and tender thought must have come to them that in the graves of
aliens buried among them lay those as deeply mourned in Northern homes
as were those they themselves had loved