Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as he knows its tragic sorrow. Glance again at the ending of _Lewis Rand_. It is quiet but in the unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he must have sleep.’” It is placed squarely upon you to construct the picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and lose himself from the secret terror. Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling at all; purely reflex physical action was the most that was possible for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no consciousness that could be recognized as such. The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man. Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character. But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the strict report of their verdict on him--“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!” * * * * *