There has been now and again an illustrious personage, who appears to us to have been mirrored upon the foreground of events like some titanic silhouette. The irony of fate has dealt with such a man, as the creature of an hour, holding him in thrall in time of peace, to become the storm spirit in some great crisis. When he dies the face of history is saddened and obscured, and a twilight like that observed under Southern skies, falls upon the world. Such a person may be fitly called the courier of fate; or better still, the tragedian of revolution. He cannot be weighed or measured by the definitive judgment of contemporaries. When he dies the stride of conquest is checked; sword blades dripping with human blood are thrust back into scabbards. In war, he is its inspiration; its providence. I make no allusion just now to that splendid effigy that is yet discerned in the haze that lowers over Vienna, Berlin and Moscow; that incomprehensible tutor of strategic science, who with sword and cannon cut a red swath through the capital cities of Europe; and partitioned the world into two dominions, as if he were only dividing in twain an apple. I speak not of him, whom this man that "embarrassed God," found a waif, and made a giant, whose death hastened to its decline that splendid imperialism that the great Napoleon erected on the ruins of the commune. The fall of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville thrust betwixt the Confederacy and independence a pall so dense, that it could not be cut asunder with the sword. I can compare Stonewall Jackson with no hero, living or dead. He stood in the foreground an unique personality--a phenomenon. With the genius of war he appeared almost supernaturally mated. Whether his unparalleled victories were the result of combinations essentially tactical, of methods logically conceived, or of an intuition that almost without arrangement forced its power upon vast evolutions, will perhaps never be known. The plain profile of this man reminds one of the hard-hitting, rough-riding Roundhead. His dispatches smacked of the Calvinism of Ireton and Cromwell. "God blessed our arms at McDowell yesterday." Wherever there was a downpour of leaden rain Jackson and the "Ironsides" would have been in accord. His was the spirit that resolved combinations in his favor. His masterly apprehension of issues diminished the carnage by plucking the fruit before it was fully ripe. In war as elsewhere he was absorbed by a fatalism, such as Mohammedans sum up when they say "What is to be, will be." Napoleon, like an astrologer, believed in a star; Jackson, unlike an astrologer, believed in Him who made the star and lighted it in the candelabra of night.