Read Ebook: The Last Leaf Observations during Seventy-Five Years of Men and Events in America and Europe by Hosmer James Kendall

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In speaking of soldiers I shall do better to pay slight attention to the men of chief importance; for them the trumpets have sounded sufficiently and I came into personal contact with only one or two. Grant, I saw once, after he was Lieutenant-General, on the platform of a railroad station submitting stoically to the compliments of a lively crowd of women. Once again I saw him, in academic surroundings, sturdy and impassive, an incongruous element among the caps and gowns; but it was among such men that he won what is to my mind one of his greatest victories. What triumph of Grant's was greater than his subjugation of Matthew Arnold! I rode once on the railroad-train for some hours immediately behind Sheridan, and had a good chance to study the sinewy little man in his trim uniform which showed every movement of his muscles. Though the ride was hot and monotonous I was impressed with his vitality. He seemed to have eyes all around his head. The man was in repose, but it was the repose of a leopard; at a sudden call, every fibre would evidently become tense, the servant of a nimble brain, and an instant pounce upon any opposition could be depended upon. What a pity, I found myself thinking, that the fellow has no longer a chance for his live energy , and I had to check an incipient wish that a turmoil might arise that would again give a proper scope to his soldierly force. Happily there was no longer need for such service, but I feel that Sheridan was really more than a good sword. One finds in his memoirs unexpected outbursts of fancy and high sentiment, and he could admire the fine heroism of a character like Charles Russell Lowell. It is fair to judge a man by what he admires.

At the Harvard commemoration of 1865, standing under the archway at the northern end of Gore Hall, I encountered the thin, plainly clad figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was in soldier's dress and as he gave me a nod of recognition he said, looking at my chevrons, very simply but with feeling, "This day belongs to you." Passing around then to the west front, I had before me a contrast in a brilliant group marshalled by my friend and classmate Colonel Theodore Lyman, in the centre of which rose the stately figure in full uniform of Major-General Meade. "Ah, Jimmy," said Theodore with the aggressive geniality which his old associates so well remember, "come right here," and catching me by the arm he pulled the corporal into the immediate presence of the victor of Gettysburg. "This is Corporal Hosmer," said he, "and this, Jimmy, is Major-General Meade," introducing us with much friendly patting of my shoulder and a handling of the Major-General almost equally familiar. He had long been a trusted member of Meade's staff but the war was over and a close friendship held them on common ground. "He has written a book, General, about the war." Then came a word of commendation and the tall General, as he gave my hand a cordial pressure, beamed down upon me with pleasant eyes. In the peaceful time that had come, we were all citizens together; the private and the General were on a level, though that aquiline face had been called upon not long before to confront, at the head of one hundred thousand men, the hosts of Lee.

Of our other great commanders I never saw Thomas, but my knowledge of Sherman was something more than the mere glimpse I had of the figures of his compeers. His home was in St. Louis, in which city I was then residing, and he was much in society. He was really a Connecticut Yankee though transplanted to Ohio, and he was, in figure and character, thoroughly a New Englander. He was tall and slender, his prominent forehead standing out from light straight hair, a stubby beard veiling a well-pronounced and well-worked jaw , it would require little scratching to get to the uncontaminated Yankee underneath. A New Englander of the best type, shrewd, kindly, deeply concerned for the welfare of his country and of men. A fashionable lady invited him to dine without his wife. Sherman, on arriving, found other ladies present; to his hostess, who came forward to receive him with effusion, he said: "Madam, I dine with Mrs. Sherman to-night," and the party went forward without the lion who was to have given it distinction. He would not have his wife slighted; nor in more important things would he endure to see a lame outcome when he might set things in better shape. He encouraged schools and worthy charities by giving them his hearty countenance. No arm was more potent than his in saving the country, nor was his patriotism selfish. He saved his country because he believed it was for the good of the world.

Sherman has been criticised for his ruthlessness, but no one can say that he was not effective. He bore on hard but with the belief that only such action could bring the war to a close. No one could come in contact with him without feeling that he was a soft-hearted man. It was one of the most interesting evenings of my life when, as a guest of N.O. Nelson, the philanthropic captain of industry in St. Louis, I was one of a company of a dozen to hear Sherman tell John Fiske his story of the war. We sat at table from seven o'clock until midnight, the two illustrious figures with their heads together exchanging a rapid fire of question and answer, but the rest of us were by no means silent. Sherman was full of affability and took good-naturedly the sharp inquiries. "How was it, General, at Shiloh; was not your line quite too unguarded on the Corinth side, and was not the coming on of Sidney Johnston a bad surprise for you?" "Oh, later in the war," said Sherman, "we no doubt should have done differently, but we got ready for them as they came on." "Was there not bad demoralisation," I said, "ten thousand or more skulkers huddled under the bluff on the Tennessee?" "Oh," said Sherman, "the rear of an army in battle is always a sorry place; but on the firing line, where I was, things did not look so bad."--"Your adversaries, General, were often good fellows, were they not, and you are good friends now?" "The best fellows in the world," said Sherman, "and as to friendship, Hood wants me to be his literary executor and take care of his memoirs."

After his death, there took place in the streets of St. Louis an imposing military funeral. As the cort?ge paused for a moment, I stood at the side of the gun-carriage which bore the coffin wrapped in the flag, and paid my tribute to this good man and great citizen who had played his part well.

A certain pathos attaches to the story of some of those civilian soldiers. In my youthful days, I had often seen N.P. Banks, who had risen from the humblest beginning into much political importance. No large distinction can be claimed for him in any direction, and for elevation of character he was certainly not marked; but he was a man of respectable ability and he climbed creditably from factory-boy to mechanic and thence to Congress, to the post of Governor, and to the Speakership at Washington.

He had military ambition and with the beginning of the war went at once into the army, unfortunately for him, as major-general and commander of a department. Could he have gone in as captain or colonel, his fortune would probably have been different. But, sent to command in the Shenandoah Valley, it was his fate to meet at the outset the most formidable of adversaries, Stonewall Jackson. He was sorely hoodwinked and humiliated, but so were several of his successors. At Cedar Mountain, understanding that his orders were peremptory, he threw his corps upon double their numbers and fought with all the bravery in the world though with defective tactics. Another corps should have been at hand, but it failed to arrive. There was a moment when Banks, weak though he was, was near to victory, but he failed in the end in an impossible task and was made scapegoat for the blunders of others. He was sent to supersede Butler in Louisiana with a force quite inadequate for the duty expected. It was here that I came into contact with him. Interested friends had laid my case before him, as one who might serve well in a higher position than that of a private, and he good-naturedly sent word to me to report to him at a certain hour in the rotunda of the St. Charles H?tel at New Orleans. The city was in the firm grasp of the Union, as our transport had sailed up the evening before. The ships of Farragut, their decks crowded with blue jackets held under their broad-sides a dense and sullen multitude. A heavy salute reverberated from the river as the new commander took his place, but conditions were precarious.

Banks was a kindly man who meant and did the best he could for the humblest soldier in his army. His further military career I can only briefly sketch. He planned two fierce and calamitous assaults upon Port Hudson; errors no doubt, but Grant and Lee at the moment were making just such errors. The Red River campaign was a disastrous failure, but Banks had every handicap which a general could suffer: an insufficient force, a demand from the Administration that he should attend to a civil reordering when only fighting was in place, subordinates insolent and disobedient. And finally nature herself took arms against him, for the Red River fell when, by all precedents, it should have risen. It was an enterprise which his judgment utterly disapproved, the difficulties of which he faced with good resolution. It ended his career, for though once at a later time he went to Congress, he ever afterwards stood a discredited figure, dying, as I have heard, poor and broken-hearted in obscurity. His State has tried to render him a late justice by setting him up in bronze on Beacon Hill. It was done through opposition and the statue is sneered at more often than admired. He was an able man I believe and meant well, and I for one find it pathetic that the lines of my old commander did not fall more pleasantly.

Butler, on the other hand, I do not regard as a pathetic figure. On the night of my arrival in New Orleans, strolling about the strange city, I found myself at headquarters, and a Massachusetts boy standing sentry on the porch in a spirit of comradeship invited me up. As I ascended the steps Butler, who had been standing at the door, closed it with a crash and retired within. Through a crevice in the blinds he was plain to be seen seated at his desk in profound thought, his bull-dog face in repose, his rude forcefulness very manifest. His rule at New Orleans had come to an end and no doubt he was pondering it and dreaming of what the future had in store for him. His burly frame was relaxed, his bluff unshaken countenance with the queer sinister cast of the eyes fully lighted up by the lamp on his table. I studied him at leisure, his marvellous energy for a moment in repose. In those days his name was much in the mouths of men, and whatever may be said in his disfavour, it cannot be denied after fifty years that his rule of New Orleans was a masterpiece of resolution, a riding rough-shod over a great disaffected city which marked him as full of intrepidity and executive force. In the field he was a worse failure than ever Banks had been. In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation by Charles Francis Adams. He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant's advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a pachyderm of the toughest--too thick-skinned to be troubled by the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with unquenched energy, sometimes a power for good and sometimes for evil. It is hard to strike the balance and say whether for the most part he helped or hindered, but our past would lack a strong element of picturesqueness if old Ben Butler were eliminated.

There were pathetic figures among the West Pointers as well as among the civilian generals. At St. Louis, in the seventies, I used to see sometimes an unobtrusive man in citizen's dress, marked by no trait which distinguished him from the ordinary, a man serious in his bearing, who one might easily think had undergone some crushing blow. This was Major-General John Pope. His son was in our university and his sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend. Pope seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an incompetent. Probably no man of that time meant better or was more abused by capricious fate. Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends him vigorously. In the early years of the war he showed himself bold and active. The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was rather a naval and engineering exploit than an achievement of the army, but Pope seems to have done well what was required of him and probably deserved his promotion to the command of a corps at Corinth when an advance southward was meditated in the early summer of '62. It was with deep unwillingness that he received the summons of the Administration to command an army in Virginia, and only assumed the place from the feeling that a soldier must stand where he is put. Arrived at Washington, he found himself in an atmosphere hot with wrath and mortification. The Peninsular campaign had failed and strong spirits like Stanton and Ben Wade, Chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, were on fire through disappointment. The new General, whose position until within a few months had been a humble one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his own. He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were practically dictated by others. The declaration that his headquarters would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, "then his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be," Pope declares he never made. When his environment had in this way aroused prejudice against him, he was set to command an army whose higher officers felt outraged at his sudden rise over their heads and whose soldiers were discouraged by defeat. He was expected to oppose skilful and victorious foes with instruments that bent and broke in the crisis as he tried to wield them. Only supreme genius could have wrought success in such a situation, and that Pope did not at all possess. He was only a man of resolution, with no exceptional gifts, who desired to do his best for his country. In the West he had proceeded usefully and honourably, and it was the worst misfortune for him that he was taken for the new place. I hope that history will deal kindly with him and that, since he was a worthy and strenuous patriot, he will not live merely as an object of execration and ridicule.

In August, 1863, my too brief term of service having expired, I came home to the Connecticut Valley and resumed my pulpit, which I had left for a vacation and powder-smoke. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had taken place, and we at the North too fondly hoped that all was over and that we might confidently settle down to peace. When going west to Buffalo for a visit I was delayed a few hours at Syracuse and took the occasion to call on an intimate friend of my father and myself, the Rev. Samuel J. May. Mr. May, a bright and beautiful spirit, was by nature a strong peace man, but, fired by the woes of the slave, he had become an extreme abolitionist and was ready to fight for his principles. Entering Mr. May's quiet study I found him in intimate talk with a man of unassuming demeanour, in citizen's dress, marked by no distinction of face or figure. He might have been a delegate to a peace convention, or a country minister from way-back calling on a professional brother. What was my astonishment when Mr. May introduced him as Major-General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps, who, taking a short furlough after Gettysburg, was at home for the moment and had dropped in for a friendly call. Slocum had been in the thick of most of the bitter Virginia battles from the first, and all the world knew that at Gettysburg, by beating back the thrust of the Stonewall division toward the Baltimore pike, he had secured the threatened rear of the army of the Potomac and averted defeat. This had taken place in the preceding month, and I naturally marvelled that the unpretending, simple man could be that victorious champion, but for the time being we were there plain citizens, and, American fashion, the Major-General and the Corporal shook hands and fraternised on equal terms. It probably helped me with Slocum that I too had been in danger. About the time he was defending Culp's Hill, I had been in the ditch at the foot of the Port Hudson rampart.

While reticent as to his part at Gettysburg, he spoke with feeling of what his corps had been through, and knowing that both Mr. May and I were Massachusetts men took an evident pleasure in commending the regiments from that State. Of the 2d Massachusetts he spoke with high appreciation; it was an admirable body of men and thoroughly disciplined. It was always ready; its losses were fearful and he felt that he ought to spare it if he could, but a crisis always came when only the best would answer, and again and again the 2d Massachusetts was thrown in. Particularly at Gettysburg its services had been great and its sacrifice costly. He spoke feelingly of the young officers who had been slain and also of humbler men. Since that time I have stood by the simple stone at the "bloody swale at the foot of Culp's Hill," which marked the position held that day by the 2d Massachusetts. It takes no trained eye to see that it was a point of especial difficulty and importance. Some of the men of that regiment who fell that day were my own college comrades. I was glad to know from his lips that the commander thought their work heroic.

One naturally brackets the name of Slocum with that of Howard, secondary figures of course in the great Civil War drama and yet both steadfast and worthy soldiers. They rose together into places of responsibility during the Peninsular campaign, became commanders of corps about the same time, served side by side at Gettysburg, went together to the West, and finally, one at the head of Sherman's right wing and the other at the head of the left, made the march to the sea and through the Carolinas. Neither perhaps was a brilliant soldier. So far as the records show, Slocum always did his work well, was increasingly trusted to the last, and nowhere made a grave mistake. In Howard's case, the rout at Chancellorsville will always detract from his fame; he was, however, on that day new in his place, and the infatuation of Hooker by an evil contagion passed down to his lieutenants. But he too steadily improved, refusing resolutely to be discouraged by his mistakes and always doing better next time. Perhaps no one act during the war was more important than the occupation of Cemetery Hill on the morning of July 1, 1863, by a Federal division. I think that the credit of that act cannot be denied to Howard. In a later time he passed under the control of Sherman in the West, a shrewd and relentless judge of men, and Sherman trusted him to the utmost. To a group of officers in their cups who were chaffing Howard for being Puritanical, Sherman curtly said: "Let Howard alone; I want one general who doesn't drink."

I saw General Howard at Gettysburg on the fortieth anniversary of the battle. We were under the same roof, and during the evening I sat close to him in the common room and heard him talk,--a strenuous old man, his empty sleeve recalling tragically the combats through which he had passed. Close by under the stars could still be traced the lines occupied by Steinwehr's division, the troops which with such momentous results Howard had posted on Cemetery Hill. I might easily have talked with him, for he was affable to old and young, but I preferred to study the good veteran from a distance and let others draw out his story while I listened.

In the winter of 1861 I went to Port Royal, through the good offices of my friend Rufus Saxton, then a captain and quartermaster of the expedition under which Dupont had taken possession of the Sea Islands in South Carolina. The capture of Port Royal had taken place a few weeks before and the army was encamped on the conquered territory. Saxton was an interesting figure, who in an unusual way showed during the war a fine spirit of self-sacrifice. At the outbreak, a high position in the field was within his grasp; he was second in command to Lyon in St. Louis, and being intimate with McClellan might have held a position of responsibility in the field. He was indeed made a general. Once in 1862 he was in command of a considerable force, and when Banks was driven out of the Shenandoah Valley by Stonewall Jackson he withstood at Harper's Ferry the rush of the Confederates into Maryland. But at the solicitation of Lincoln and Stanton he gave up service in the field, for which he was well fitted and which he earnestly desired, to act as Military Governor of the Sea Islands, where his work was to receive and care for the thousands of negroes who by the flight of their masters in that region had been left to themselves. Here he remained throughout the war, while his old comrades were winning fame at the head of divisions and corps, a patient, humane teacher and administrator among the nation's wards. He was content to live through the stirring time inconspicuous, but he won the respect of all kindly hearts at the North and deep gratitude from the helpless blacks whom he so long and humanely befriended.

I came in contact during that visit with a number of soldiers soon to be famous. In the boat which carried me from the transport to the shore I had as a fellow-passenger James H. Wilson, then a lieutenant but soon to be a famous cavalry commander. He was a restless athletic young man, who when I met him was on fire with wrath over the giving up of Mason and Slidell, the news of which had come to the post by our steamer. I tried to argue with him, that we had enough on our hands with the South without rushing into war with England besides, but he was impetuously confident that we could take care of all foes outside and in, and maintained that the giving up of the envoys was a burning shame. His vigour and confidence were excessive, I thought, but they carried him far in a time soon to come.

I talked with General Thomas W. Sherman, the commander of the expedition, in his tent, but was more interested in a dispute which presently sprang up between the General and a companion of mine, Jonathan Saxton, father of Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist of the most perfervid type, a good talker and quite unabashed, plain farmer though he was, by a pair of epaulettes.

Dear ghosts of old-time friends swarm in my thought as I dream of those days. The white marbles in Memorial Chapel solemnly bear the names of Harvard's Civil War soldiers and tell how they died. There was one of whom I might say much, an elder companion, a wise and pleasant spirit who did something toward my shaping for life. A cannon-ball at Cold Harbor was the end for him. There was another, a brilliant, handsome young Irishman, bred a Catholic, who under the influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left his Washington home for a radical environment in the North. He was brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment. He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave light-hearted, as part of the day's work which must not be shirked. I have his image vividly as he laughed and joked in our last interview. "Dress-parade at six o'clock; come over and see the dress-paradoes!" He fell wounded at Chancellorsville, and while being carried off the field was struck a second time as he lay on the stretcher, and so he passed.

There were fine fellows, too, in those days who stood on the other side: McKim, President of the Hasty Pudding Club, who fell in Virginia; W.H.F. Lee, who was in the Law School and whom I recall as a stalwart athlete rowing on the Charles. It helped me much a few years ago when I visited many Southern battle-fields that I could tell old Confederates "Rooney" Lee and I had in our youth been college mates. My classmate J.B. Clark of Mississippi was a graceful magnetic fellow who had small basis of scholarship, perhaps, but a marked power for effective utterance. He fascinated us by his warm Southern fluency, and we gave him at last the highest distinction we could confer, the class oration. He left us then and we did not see him for fifty years. He enlisted in the 21st Mississippi and passed through the roughest hardships and perils. We felt afterwards that he held coldly aloof from us through long years. At our jubilee, however, he came back wrinkled and white-haired, but quite recognisable as the fascinating boy of fifty years before. He had a long and good record behind him as an officer of the University of Texas, and we gave him reason to think that we loved him still. The most cordial meetings I have ever known have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last have come out on common ground.

Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Massachusetts. I remember well a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand.

Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for the sharpshooters. A ball had passed through his remaining foot, and still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage by reverent friends.

Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar of his class, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the old-fashioned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, but which we old fellows think was a good tough game for all that. I had secured the ball, and thinking I had time, placed it rather leisurely, promising myself an effective kick. A slight figure bounded with lightning rush from the opposing line, and from under my very foot drove the ball far behind me to a point which secured victory.

How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical battle-fields were to be put to splendid use. He proved to be a nearly perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that could be added to Lowell. To us he seems one of the manliest of men, thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts. In Edward Emerson's charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under him before he came to death himself. He studied their characters as if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the particular lovable traits each one showed--these mute companions who stood so closely by him in life and death.

When our class first assembled in 1851 there was a slight boy of seventeen in the company, Francis Channing Barlow. He was inconspicuous through face or figure, but it early became clear that he was to be our first scholar, and a wayward deportment with an odd sardonic wit soon made him an object of interest. Barlow came admirably fitted, and this good preparation, standing back of great quickness and power of mind, made it easy for him almost without study to take a leading place. As a boy he was well grounded, outside of his special accomplishments, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I remember his telling me that his mother read Plutarch to him when he was a child, and that and many another good book he had thoroughly stored away. Such accomplishments were an exasperation to us poor fellows who had come in from the remote outskirts and found we must compete for honours with men so well equipped. We perhaps magnified the gifts and acquirements of the fellows who had been more favourably placed. Barlow seemed like a paragon of scholarship, and the nonchalance with which he always won in the classrooms was a constant marvel. He had a queer way of turning serious things into fun. With a freshman desire for self-improvement, a thing apt to evaporate in the college atmosphere, we had formed a society for grave writing and debate and hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the "Glorious Apollers" or some such organisation. At an early meeting of the society, while we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in plumes and draperies. He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had come to take part. He danced and paraded before the conclave and had no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious. It was said that Barlow, going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing. The story, of course, was an invention, but quite in character.

Before the Arsenal in Cambridge stood an innocent old cannon that had not been fired since the War of 1812, perhaps not since the Revolution. The grass and flowers grew about its silent muzzle, and lambs might have fed there as in the pretty picture of Landseer. Any thought that the old cannon could go off had long ceased to be entertained. One quiet night a tremendous explosion took place; the cannon had waked up from its long sleep, arousing the babies over a wide region and many a pane of glass was shivered. What had got into the old cannon that night was long a mystery. Many years after Barlow was discovered at the bottom of it--it was the first shot he ever fired.

I recall a reunion in 1865, ten years after our graduation. We sat in full numbers about a sumptuous banquet at the Parker House in Boston, and naturally in that year the returned soldiers were in the foreground. In our class were two major-generals, four colonels, a distinguished surgeon, and many more of lower rank. Barlow was the central figure. Theodore Lyman, who presided, introduced him with a glowing tribute, recounting his achievements, a long list from the time he had entered as a private to his culmination as a full Major-General. He called at last for nine cheers for the man who had captured the Spottsylvania salient, and we gave them with a roar that shook the building. Barlow was the only man in the room who showed not the slightest emotion. He stood impassive, his face wearing his queer smile. Other men might have been abashed at the tumultuous warmth of such a reception from his old mates; a natural utterance at such a time would have been an expression of joy that the war was over and that the country had been saved, coupled with modest satisfaction that he had borne some part in the great vindication, but that was not Barlow's way. He laughed it off lightly, as if it had been a huge joke. My classmate, the late Joseph Willard of Boston, told me of a reunion of the class at a time much later. The men were discussing the stained-glass window which it had been decided should be put in Memorial Hall. Since the class had a distinguished military record it was felt that there should be martial suggestion in the window and the question was what classic warrior should be portrayed. The face, it was thought, should have the lineaments of our most famous soldier. Barlow, who was present, pooh-poohed the whole idea, especially the suggestion that his face should appear, but someone present having suggested Alcibiades, probably not seriously as a proper type, that seemed to strike Barlow's sense of humour. That reckless classic scapegrace to his cynical fancy perhaps might pass, he might be Alcibiades, but who should be the dog? Alcibiades had a dog whose misfortune in losing his tail has been transmitted through centuries by the pen of Plutarch. "Who will be the dog?" said Barlow and called upon someone to furnish a face for the hero's canine companion. The scheme for the window came near to going to wreck amid the outbursts of laughter. It was carried through later, however, but Alcibiades and the dog do not appear, although Barlow does. No other Harvard soldier reached Barlow's eminence, and probably in the whole Army of the Potomac there were few abler champions. He was a strange, gifted, most picturesque personality, no doubt a better man under his cynical exterior than he would ever suffer it to be thought. His service was great, and the memory of him is an interesting and precious possession to those who knew him in boyhood and were in touch with him to the end.

HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE

The cataclysm of the Civil War, in which as the preceding pages show I had been involved, had shaken me in my old moorings. I found myself not content in a quiet parish in the Connecticut Valley, and as I fared forth was fortunate enough to meet a leader in a remarkable personage. Horace Mann was indeed dead, but remained, as he still remains, a power. His brilliant gifts and self-consecration made him, first, a great educational path-breaker. From that he passed into politics, exhibiting in Congress abilities of the highest. Like an inconstant lover, however, he harked back to his old attachment, and putting aside a fine preferment, the governorship of Massachusetts, it was said, forsook his old home for the headship of Antioch College in south-western Ohio. I shall not dispute here whether or not he chose wisely; much less, how far a lame outcome at Antioch was due to his human limitations, and how far to the inevitable conditions. He was a potent and unselfish striver for the betterment of men, and his words and example still remain an inspiration.

My father held fast to the sharp-cornered saint and prophet, though somewhat excoriated in the association. He held fast to his trusteeship of Antioch; and in 1866, Horace Mann having some years before been laid in his untimely grave, he stood in his place as president of the college. Through the agency of my dear friends of those years, Dr. Henry W. Bellows and Dr. Edward Everett Hale, I was to go with him as, so to speak, his under-study, discharging the work of English professor and sometimes the duties of preacher. I went gladly. The spirit of the dead leader haunted pervasively the shades where he had laboured and died. The tradition of Horace Mann was paramount among the students, the graduates, and the whole environment. I had felt as a boy the spell of his voice and presence and knew no hero whom I could follow more cordially. It was a joy to become domiciled in the house which had been built for him and where he had breathed his last, and to labour day by day along the noble lines which he had laid down. This was my post for six years, one of which, however, was spent in Europe, in the hope of gaining an added fitness for my place.

"Backe and side go bare, go bare, Booth foot and hand go colde; But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe, Whether it be new or olde!"

"Theseus, with alle joye and blys, With his Ypolite, the faire queene, And Emelye, clothed al in greene, On hontyng be they riden ryally,"

a "cry of hounds" was counterfeited under the windows in the quadrangle. The students present thought it was a real chase, and were seized with a sudden transport to join the hunters. At this, the delighted queen, sitting in stiff ruff and farthingale among her maids of honour, burst out above all the tumult with "Oh, excellent! These boys, in very truth, are ready to leap out of the windows to follow the hounds!" When the play was over, the queen called up the poet, who was present, and the actors, and loaded them with thanks and compliments.

When, forty years after, in 1605, the dull James came to Oxford, the poor boys had a harder time. A thing very noteworthy happened when the king entered the city in his progress from Woodstock. If Warton's notion is correct, scarcely the iron cross in the pavement that marks the spot where the bishops were burned, or the solemn chamber in which they were tried, yea, scarcely Guy Fawkes's lantern, which they show you at the Bodleian, or the Brazen Nose itself, are memorials as interesting as the archway leading into the quadrangle of St. John's College, under whose carving, quaint and graceful, one now gets the lovely glimpse into the green and bloom of the gardens at the back. At this gate, three youths dressed like witches met the king, declaring they were the same that once met Macbeth and Banquo, prophesying a kingdom to one and to the other a generation of monarchs, that they now appeared to show the confirmation of the prediction. Warton's conjecture is that Shakespeare heard of this, or perhaps was himself in the crowd that watched the boys as they came whirling out in their weird dance, and that then and there was conceived what was to become so mighty a product of the human brain,--Macbeth.

King James, however, received it all coldly. The University, kindled by the traditions of Elizabeth's visit, did its best. Leland gives a glimpse of the stage arrangements in Christ Church Hall. Towards the end "was a scene like a wall, painted and adorned by stately pillars, which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other painted cloths, their stage did vary three times." But the king liked the scholastic hair-splitting with which he was elsewhere entertained better than the plays. In Christ Church Hall he yawned and even went to sleep, saying it was all mere childish amusement. In fact, the poor boys had to put up with even a worse rebuff; the king spoke many words of dislike, and when, in one of the plays, a pastoral, certain characters came in somewhat scantily attired, the queen and maids of honour took great offence, in which the king, who was not ordinarily over-delicate, concurred.

"for fault but small, or none at all."

A famed contemporary of Udal was Richard Mulcaster, head-master of St. Paul's school, and afterward of Merchant Taylors', concerning whom we have, from delightful old Fuller, this quaint and naive description:

In a morning he would exactly and plainly construe and parse the lesson to his scholars, which done, he slept his hour in his desk in the school; but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him just as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.

The name of this Rhadamanthus of the birch occurs twice in entries of Elizabeth's paymaster, as receiving money for plays acted before her; and a certain proficiency as actors possessed by students of St. John's College at Oxford is ascribed to training given by old Mulcaster at the Merchant Taylors' school.

"They make all their schollers play-boyes! Is't not a fine sight to see all our children made enterluders? Doe we pay our money for this? Wee send them to learne their grammar and their Terence and they learne their play-bookes. Well they talk we shall have no more parliaments, God blesse us! But an we have, I hope Zeale-of-the-land Buzzy, and my gossip Rabby Trouble-Truth, will start up and see we have painfull good ministers to keepe schoole, and catechise our youth; and not teach 'em to speake plays and act fables of false newes."

Studying this rather unexplored subject, one gets many a glimpse of famous characters in interesting relations. Erasmus says that Sir Thomas More, "adolescens, comoediolas et scripsit et egit," and while a page with Archbishop Moreton, as plays were going on in the palace during the Christmas holidays, he would often, showing his schoolboy accomplishment, step on the stage without previous notice, and exhibit a part of his own which gave more satisfaction than the whole performance besides.

In Leland's report of the theatricals where King James behaved so ungraciously, "the machinery of the plays," he says, "was chiefly conducted by Mr. Jones, who undertook to furnish them with rare devices, but performed very little to what was expected." This is believed to have been Inigo Jones, who soon was to gain great fame as manager of the Court masques. The entertainment was probably ingenious and splendid enough, but every one took his cue from the king's pettishness, and poor "Mr. Jones" had to bear his share of the ill-humour.

Do I need to cite other precedents for the procedure at the Sweetbrier? I grant you it cannot be done from the practice of American colleges. The strictest form of Puritanism stamped itself too powerfully upon our New England institutions at their foundation, and has affected too deeply the newer seminaries elsewhere in the country, to make it possible that the drama should be anything but an outlaw here. Nevertheless, at Harvard, Yale, and probably every considerable college of the country, the drama has for a long time led a clandestine life in secret student societies, persecuted or at best ignored by the college government,--an unwholesome weed that deserved no tending, if it was not to be at once uprooted.

"He that pointeth ill, A good sentence may oft spill."

Who can doubt the value to the bearing, the fine address, the literary culture of a youth of either sex that might come from the careful study and the attempt to render adequately a fine conception of some golden writer of our golden age, earnestly made, if only partially successful?

The young ladies have declaimed and sung this work with so much modesty and piety, it has not been possible to keep it shut up in the secrecy of the institution; so that a diversion of young people has become a subject of interest for all the Court;

Shall I admit for a moment that our American young folks have less grace and sensibility than the French girls, and the Oxford youths who pleased Elizabeth? Your face now, Fastidiosus, wears a frown like that of Rhadamanthus; but I remember our Hasty-Pudding days, when you played the part of a queen, and behaved in your disguise like Thor, in the old saga, when he went to Riesenheim in the garb of Freya, and honest giants, like Thrym, were frightened back the whole width of the hall. Well, I do not censure it, and I do not believe you recall it with a sigh; and the reminiscence emboldens me to ask you whether it would not be still better if our dear Harvard, say , among the many new wrinkles she in her old age so appropriately contracts, should devote an evening of Commencement-time to a performance, by the students, under the sanction and direction of professors, of some fine old masterpiece?

"The quality of mercy is not strained,"

Then came long weeks of drill. In the passage,

"O my lord, When you went onward to this ended action, I looked upon her with a soldier's eye," etc.,

Claudio caught the fervour and softness at last, and seemed like Palamon, in love indeed. Ursula and Hero rose easily to the delicate poetry of the passages that begin,

"The pleasantest angling is to see the fish Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,"

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