ionate duty to his impoverished and suffering
people, and with a high estimate of the importance of mental and moral
culture to a generation of youth whose earlier years were attended by
war's rough teachings, he went from the tented field and the command
of armies to the quiet shades of a scholastic institution in the
secluded valleys of his own native Virginia, and entered with all the
earnestness of his nature upon the duties of instruction, and there
spent the closing years of his life in training the minds and hearts
of young men from all parts of the country for the highest usefulness
'in their day and generation.' By these pursuits, and his exemplary
and unobtrusive life since the close of the great war in America, he
won the respect and admiration of the enlightened and the good of the
whole world. It is meet and natural, therefore, that his own people
should bewail his death as a sore personal bereavement to each one of
them. Those of us here assembled who were his soldiers, friends, and
supporters, sharing all the trials and many of the responsibilities of
that period of his life which brought him so prominently before the
world, honored and trusted him then, have loved and admired him, have
been guided by his example since; and now that he is dead, we should
be unworthy of ourselves, and unworthy to be called his countrymen,
did we not feel and express the same poignant grief which now afflicts
those among whom he lived and died.

"Those of us who were not his soldiers, friends, and supporters, when
war raged throughout the land, but who have nevertheless met here
to-day with those who were our enemies then, but are now our friends
and countrymen, and appreciate with them the character of Lee, and
admire his rare accomplishments as an American citizen, whose fame and
name are the property of the nation, we all unite over his hallowed
sepulchre in an earnest prayer that old divisions may be composed, and
that a complete and perfect reconciliation of all estrangements may be
effected at the tomb, where all alike, in a feeling of common
humanity and universal Christian brotherhood, may drop their tears of
heart-felt sorrow.

"Therefore, without regard to our former relations toward each other,
but meeting as Americans by birth or adoption, and in the broadest
sense of national unity, and in the spirit above indicated, to do
honor to a great man and Christian gentleman who has gone down to the
grave, we do

"