in the daily intercourse of pleasure
and of business, no great public calamity can befall any people in the
world without touching a sympathetic chord in the hearts of thousands.
When, therefore, tidings reached us that General Robert E. Lee, of
Virginia, was dead, and that the people of that and all the other
Southern States of the Union were stricken with grief, the great
public heart of New York was moved with a generous sympathy, which
found kindly and spontaneous expression through the columns of the
city press of every shade of opinion.

"All differences of the past, all bitter memories, all the feuds
that have kept two great sections of our country in angry strife and
controversy for so long, have been forgotten in the presence of the
awe-inspiring fact that no virtues, no deeds, no honors, nor any
position, can save any member of the human family from the common lot
of all.

"The universal and profound grief of our Southern countrymen is
natural and honorable alike to themselves and to him whom they mourn,
and is respected throughout the world; for Robert E. Lee was allied
and endeared to them by all the most sacred ties that can unite an
individual to a community. He was born and reared in their midst,
and shared their local peculiarities, opinions, and traditional
characteristics; and his preeminent abilities and exalted personal
integrity and Christian character made him, by common consent, their
leader and representative in a great national conflict in which they
had staked life, fortune, and honor; and in Virginia his family was
coeval with the existence of the State, and its name was emblazoned
upon those bright pages of her early civil and military annals which
record the patriotic deeds of Washington and his compeers.

"By no act of his did he ever forfeit or impair the confidence thus
reposed in him by his own peculiar people; and when he had, through
years of heroic trial and suffering, done all that mortal man could
do in discharge of the high trust confided by them to his hands,
and failed, he bowed with dignified submission to the decree of
Providence; and from the day he gave his parole at Appomattox to the
hour of his death, he so lived and acted as to deprive enmity of its
malignity, and became to his defeated soldiers and countrymen a bright
example of unqualified obedience to the laws of the land, and of
support to its established government. Nay, more. With a spirit of
Christian and affect