hat peculiar purity which belongs only to a noble boy, and which
makes him a brave and noble man, filling the page of a history
spotless until closed in death; alike in that commanding presence
which seems to be the signature of Heaven sometimes placed on a great
soul when to that soul is given a fit dwelling-place; alike in that
noble carriage and commanding dignity, exercising a mesmeric influence
and a hidden power which could not be repressed, upon all who came
within its charm; alike in the remarkable combination and symmetry of
their intellectual attributes, all brought up to the same equal level,
no faculty of the mind overlapping any other--all so equal, so well
developed, the judgment, the reason, the memory, the fancy, that
you are almost disposed to deny them greatness, because no single
attribute of the mind was projected upon itself, just as objects
appear sometimes smaller to the eye from the exact symmetry and beauty
of their proportions; alike, above all, in that soul-greatness, that
Christian virtue to which so beautiful a tribute has been rendered by
my friend whose high privilege it was to be a compeer and comrade with
the immortal dead, although in another department and sphere; and
yet alike, Mr. President, in their external fortune, so strangely
dissimilar--the one the representative and the agent of a stupendous
revolution which it pleased Heaven to bless and give birth to one of
the mightiest nations on the globe; the other the representative and
agent of a similar revolution, upon which it pleased high Heaven to
throw the darkness of its frown; so that, bearing upon his generous
heart the weight of this crushed cause, he was at length overwhelmed;
and the nation whom he led in battle gathers with spontaneity of grief
over all this land which is ploughed with graves and reddened with
blood, and the tears of a widowed nation in her bereavement are shed
over his honored grave.

"But these crude suggestions, which fall almost impromptu from my
lips, suggest that which I desire to offer before this audience
to-night. I accept Robert E. Lee as the true type of the American
man and the Southern gentleman. A brilliant English writer has well
remarked, with a touch of sound philosophy, that when a nation has
rushed upon its fate, the whole force of the national life will
sometimes shoot up in one grand character, like the aloe which blooms
at the end of a hundred years, shooting up in one single spike of