with Bryant, that "the eternal years of God" are truths; and with the Psalmist, that "Great is truth, and mighty above all things." The faith of Howard in the principles which he advocated was sublime. I knew of but one other who began the war with loftier purposes of universal good, purer motives of right, justice, and liberty, or truer ideas of the nature of the struggle as a crusade against slavery and ignorance, and he was not a general--only a major of infantry, though a brilliant "first section" graduate at West Point, but worthy ten times over of greater rank than the army could grant. Nothing could have been more beautiful than the firm faith which William H. Sidell felt from the first in the final triumph of the right, not merely in restoring the country to its former glory, unity, and strength, but in restoring and rejuvenating it, purified of that which was at once its weakness and its shame. It is somewhat of a digression to run off from Howard in this manner to speak of Major Sidell, but every reader who knew the man will think it pardonable. Sidell was a man of firm convictions, and hence a man of great influence. It used to seem to me that he was intended for the single purpose of making up other people's minds, and deciding for his acquaintances what was right and what wrong. He possessed a singularly effective, epigrammatical style of conversation, and his generally very original ideas were always expressed with great force and vigor. When he got hold of a great idea, he would talk it at you without cessation, repeating it as frequently as he found a hearer, and persist with something of the manner of those religious preachers who pride themselves on "preaching in season and out of season" until conviction followed. His ideas possessed not only value, but his language had a stamp as coinage has, and both ideas and language passed current. His ideas, oft repeated, thoroughly inculcated, found wide circulation in the army with which he served, and it was often amusing to hear his language repeated in places where they were least expected, and by persons who were never suspected of possessing minds capable of retaining grand ideas, or hearts true enough to comprehend great principles. His ideas were traceable in the language of the soldiers, relieved and often illustrated by the happy use of their familiar, commonplace "slang." They got strangely mixed up in the orders of commanding generals with whom he served, and I have even detected Sidell's undeniable stamp in one of the Executive documents. The great charm of the man was the effective style in which he advocated the firm convictions of his mind, and expressed the deep sympathies of his nature; and no man could rise from a conversation on the topics to which his mind naturally reverted, whenever he found a willing listener, without feeling the better for it, and with a better opinion of humanity in general. If he had a fault, it was that he conceived too much. His was