Fit radiation--fit close! How the
imagination--how the student loves these things! America, too, is to
have them. For not in all great deaths, nor far or near--not Caesar
in the Roman senate-house, or Napoleon passing away in the wild
night-storm at St. Helena--not Paleologus, falling, desperately
fighting, piled over dozens deep with Grecian corpses--not calm old
Socrates, drinking the hemlock--outvies that terminus of the secession
war, in one man's life, here in our midst, in our own time--that seal
of the emancipation of three million slaves--that parturition and
delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth
to commence its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact,
consistent with itself.
Nor will ever future American Patriots and Unionists, indifferently
over the whole land, or North or South, find a better moral to their
lesson. The final use of the greatest men of a Nation is, after all,
not with reference to their deeds in themselves, or their direct
bearing on their times or lands. The final use of a heroic-eminent
life--especially of a heroic-eminent death--is its indirect filtering
into the nation and the race, and to give, often at many removes, but
unerringly, age after age, color and fibre to the personalism of the
youth and maturity of that age, and of mankind. Then there is a cement
to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than any thing in
written constitution, or courts or armies--namely, the cement of a
death identified thoroughly with that people, at its head, and for its
sake.
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