he
future; but it seemed otherwise to God. A poor little drummer-boy, not
knowing what he did, sped a bullet straightway to as brave a heart as
ever beat, and quenched a royal life.

I have spoken of Winthrop, but a thousand hearts will supply each its
own name wreathed with cypress and laurel. Were these lives failures?
Is not the grandeur of the sacrifice its offset? The choice of life or
death is in no man's hands. The choice is only and occasionally in the
manner. All must die. To a few, and only a few, is granted the
opportunity of dying martyrs. They rush on to meet the King of
Terrors. They wrest the crown from his awful brow, and set it on their
own triumphant. They die, not from inevitable age or irresistible
disease, but in the full flush of manhood, in the very prime and zenith
of life, in that glorious transition-hour when hope is culminating in
fruition. They die of set purpose, with unflinching will, for God and
the right. O thrice and four times happy these who bulwark liberty
with their own breasts! No common urn enshrines their sacred dust. No
vulgar marble emblazons their hero-deeds. Every place which their life
has touched becomes at once and forever holy ground. A nation's
gratitude embalms their memory. In the generations which are to come,
when we are lying in undistinguished earth, mothers shall lead their
little children by the hand, and say: "Here he was born. This is the
blue sky that bent over his baby head. Here he fell, fighting for his
country. Here his ashes lie";--and the path thither shall be well
worn, and for many and many a year there shall be hushed voices, and
trembling lips, and tear-dimmed eyes. Everywhere there shall be
death,--yours and mine,--but only here and there immortality,--and it
is his.

So the young soldier's passing away is not untimely. The longest life
can accomplish only benefaction and fame, and the life that has
accomplished these has reached life's ultimatum. It is a fair and
decorous fate to devote length of days to humanity, but he who gathers
up his life with all its beauty and happiness and hope, and lays it on
the altar of sacrifice,--he has done all. A century of earthly
existence only scatters its benefits one by one. The martyr binds his
in a single bundle of life, and the offering is complete. To all noble
minds fame is sweet and desirable, and threescore years and ten are all
too few to carve the monument more durable than bras