Nor in Europe only has this spectacle been going forward. The United States also have witnessed similarly rapid transmutations, partly due to other causes. Within a generation we have seen a gigantic national upheaval: three millions of artisans, clerks, merchants, and lawyers were transformed by the magic of a drum-beat into soldiers; and then, the conflict over, soldiers and uniforms vanished, and the labors of peace were resumed. Follow Abraham Lincoln from his Illinois log-cabin to the White House; follow Grant from his tanyard to Appomattox,--and you can compute the sweep of Fortune’s wheel. These careers were lived so near us that they hardly astonish us; they seem as natural as daylight; and in truth they are as natural as that or any other every-day miracle. As if forgetful of these, we ransack the past, or fiction, or melodramas, for heroes to admire. To weak imaginations, distance still lends enchantment. Our age has produced one romantic man, however, who had not to wait for the mellowing effects of time to be recognized as romantic. He enjoyed, almost from the outset of his career, the fame of a legendary hero, and he will, we cannot doubt, be a hero to posterity. Some future Tasso will find in his life a theme nobler than Godfrey’s, too romantic in fact for either invention or myth to enhance it. He lived dramas as naturally as Shakespeare wrote them; the commonplace could not befall him. Looking at him from one side we might say, “Here is a Homeric hero, strangely transplanted from the _Iliad_ into an era of railroads and telegraphs!” But if we fix our attention on other qualities, we discover in him a typical democrat, fit product of a democratic age. This man was Joseph Garibaldi, whose career alone would suffice to redeem the nineteenth century from the stigma of egotism and the rebuke of commonplaceness.