failure, when failure was
encountered, how to do it better. Wendell Phillips once coarsely said,
"He grew because we watered him"; which was only true in so far as
this--he was open to all impressions and influences, and gladly
profited by all the teachings of events and circumstances, no matter
how adverse or unwelcome. There was probably no year of his life in
which he was not a wiser, larger, better man than he had been the year
preceding. It was of such a nature--patient, plodding, sometimes
groping, but ever towards the light--that Tennyson sings:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

There are those who profess to have been always satisfied with his
conduct of the war, deeming it prompt, energetic, vigorous, masterly.
I did not, and could not, so regard it. I believed then--I believe
this hour,--that a Napoleon I., a Jackson, would have crushed
secession out in a single short campaign--almost in a single victory.
I believed that an advance to Richmond 100,000 strong might have been
made by the end of June, 1861; that would have insured a
counter-revolution throughout the South, and a voluntary return of
every State, through a dispersion and disavowal of its rebel chiefs,
to the councils and the flag of the Union. But such a return would
have not merely left slavery intact--it would have established it on
firmer foundations than ever before. The momentarily alienated North
and South would have fallen on each other's necks, and, amid tears and
kisses, have sealed their reunion by ignominiously making the Black
the scapegoat of their bygone quarrel, and wreaking on him the spite
which they had purposed to expend on each other. But God had higher
ends, to which a Bull Run, a Ball's Bluff, a Gaines's Mill, a
Groveton, were indispensable: and so they came to pass, and were
endured and profited by. The Republic needed to be passed through
chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came
and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs
greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes. Other men were helpful to the
great renovation, and nobly did their part in it; yet, looking back
through the lifting mists of seven eventful, tragic, trying, glorious
years, I clearly discern that the one providential leader, the
indispensable hero of the great drama--faithfully re