glory, and then expires. And wherever philosophy, refinement, and
culture, have gone upon the globe, it is possible to place the finger
upon individual men who are the exemplars of a nation's character,
those typical forms under which others less noble, less expanded, have
manifested themselves. That gentle, that perfect moderation, that
self-command which enabled him to be so self-possessed amid the most
trying difficulties of his public career, a refinement almost such as
that which marks the character of the purest woman, were blended
in him with that massive strength, that mighty endurance, that
consistency and power which gave him and the people whom he led such
momentum under the disadvantages of the struggle through which he
passed. Born from the general level of American society, blood of a
noble ancestry flowed in his veins, and he was a type of the race from
which he sprang. Such was the grandeur and urbaneness of his manner,
the dignity and majesty of his carriage, that his only peer in social
life could be found in courts and among those educated amid the
refinements of courts and thrones. In that regard there was something
beautiful and appropriate that he should become, in the later years of
his life, the educator of the young. Sir, it is a cause for mourning
before high Heaven to-night that he was not spared thirty years to
educate a generation for the time that is to come; for, as in the days
when the red banner streamed over the land, the South sent her sons
to fight under his flag and beneath the wave of his sword, these sons
have been sent again to sit at his feet when he was the disciple
of the Muses and the teacher of philosophy. Oh, that he might have
brought his more than regal character, his majestic fame, all his
intellectual and moral endowments, to the task of fitting those that
should come in the crisis of the future to take the mantle that had
fallen from his shoulders and bear it to the generations that are
unborn!

"General Lee I accept as the representative of his people, and of the
temper with which this whole Southland entered into that gigantic,
that prolonged, and that disastrous struggle which has closed, but
closed as to us in grief. Sir, they wrong us who say that the South
was ever impatient to rupture the bonds of the American Union. The war
of 1776, which, sir, has no more yet a written history than has the
war of 1861 to 1865, tells us that it was this Southland that wrought