hrough weeks of agony that was not
less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage he
looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes,
whose lips may tell? What brilliant broken plans, what baffled high
ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what
bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant
nation; a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother
wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of
his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys not yet emerged
from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy sons
just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day, and every
day rewarding, a father's love and care; and in his heart the eager,
rejoicing power to meet all demand. Before him, desolation and great
darkness! And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with
instant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal
weakness, he became the center of a nation's love, enshrined in the
prayers of a world. But all the love and all the sympathy could not
share with him his suffering. He trod the winepress alone. With
unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took
leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard
the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divine decree.

As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The
stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of
pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison-walls, from its
oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness.
Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to
the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should
will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold
voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze he
looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders, on its far sails
whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves rolling shoreward
to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening
arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the
stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only
the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence
of the receding world he heard the great