The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, September, 1851Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, September, 1851
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
personal and conscientious scruples with respect to his
qualifications. He was a man who weighed every thing with mathematical
precision.
Although open as day on topics of general interest, he was reserved in
respect to himself. I do not recollect ever to have heard him speak
egotistically, for his mind seemed always engrossed by some great
thought, and he appears, even at the close of life, to lose all
personal solicitudes in his anxiety for his country. In one of his
last letters he says, "But I must close. This may be my last
communication to you. My end is probably near, perhaps very near.
Before I reach it, I have but one serious wish to gratify--it is to
see my country quieted under some arrangement (alas, I know not what!)
that will be satisfactory to all and safe to the south." His country's
peace, and quietness, and safety, he did not see; he perished in the
storm; and there are many who knew and loved him who cherish the hope
that he is removed to a higher sphere of action--that his noble spirit
has meekly entered into the presence of its author, and that in the
starry courts above he will receive an inheritance "incorruptible,
undefiled, and that fadeth not away."
When I saw the elaborate preparations which were made here in
Charleston for his funeral, knowing his simple tastes and habits, and
his benevolence, I was at first pained, and I thought he would not
have sanctioned so much display. I feared too that solemnity would be
lost in pageantry. But it was not so. There was nothing to jar upon
the feelings of the most sensitive. All was in perfect and mournful
harmony. Silently and reverently his sorrowing countrymen bore his
remains from the steamer where they had reposed, under a canopy
wearing its thirty stars, and when the hearse, so funereal with
mournful drapery and sable plumes, entered the grounds of the citadel,
deep silence brooded over the vast multitude; noiselessly were heads
uncovered, banners dropped--not a sound but that of the tramp of
horses was heard; statue-like was that phalanx, with every eye
uplifted, to the sacred sarcophagus. If there was too much of show, it
was redeemed by the spirit that prompted it: the symbols, significant
and expressive, as they were, faintly shadowed forth the deep and
universal grief; the mournful pageantry, the tolling bell, the muffled
drum, the closed and shrouded stores and houses, gave external signs
of wo, but more impressive and affecting was the peaceful sadness
which brooded over the metropolis while it awaited the relics of the
patriot, and the deep silence which pervaded the vast procession that
followed to the City Hall, the subdued bearing of the crowd who
resorted thither, and the solemnity expressed on every face--for these
told that the great heart of the city and commonwealth wept in hushed
and sincere sorrow over "the mighty fallen in the midst of the
battle."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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