The Last Leaf: Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and EuropeHosmer, James Kendall
History
The Last Leaf: Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe
Hosmer, James Kendall
History; United States -- History
Naturally, after surveying much Virginia country once war-swept, as I
came to the head of the Shenandoah Valley, I could not miss a visit
to Lexington, where repose in honoured graves two such protagonists as
Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is a beautiful town among low mountains
green to the summit, and in the streets not a few lovely homes of the
Virginia colonial type, draped with ivy and wisteria. There stand the
buildings of Washington and Lee University, in the chapel of which
lies buried Robert E. Lee, and a short mile beyond is the Virginia
Military Institute, from which Stonewall Jackson went forth to his
fame. The memorial at Jackson's grave is appropriate, a figure in
bronze, rugged as he was in face and attire, the image of him as he
fought and fell. Different, but more impressive is the memorial of
Lee. You enter through the chapel where the students gather daily,
then passing the chancel, stand in a mausoleum, where nobly conceived
in marble the soldier lies as if asleep. He bears his symbols as
champion in chief of the "Lost Cause," but the light on his face is
not that of battle. It is serene, benignant, at peace. I was deeply
moved as I stood before it, but soon after I was to experience a
deeper thrill. The afternoon was waning when I walked on to the
Military Institute. Stonewall Jackson had been for ten years a teacher
there. The turf of the parade I was crossing had perhaps felt no
footfall more often than his. Two or three hundred pupils, the flower
of Virginia youth, were assembled in battalion, and I witnessed from
a favourable point their almost perfect drill. As the sun was about to
set, they formed in a far-extending line, with each piece at present.
They were saluting the flag, which now began slowly to descend from,
its staff. Lo, it was the flag of the Union. The band played, I
thought, with unusual sweetness, the Star-Spangled Banner, and to
the music those picked youths of the South, sons and grandsons of the
upholders of the right to sever, did all possible honour, on the sod
which Stonewall Jackson trod, hard by the grave of Lee, to the symbol
of a country united, states now and hereafter in a brotherhood not to
be broken! It was a scene to evoke tears of deep emotion, for never
before or since has it come home to me so powerfully that the Union
had been preserved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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