The pioneers of Vermont aged early under the constant strain of anxiety and hardship which their life entailed, and though most of the leaders were spared amid the dangers of the frontier, the perils of war, and intestine feuds, few reached the allotted term of man's life. Warner, whose vigorous constitution was sapped by the stress of continuous campaigns, died in 1785, aged only forty-two, six years before the State in whose defense he first drew his sword became a recognized member of the nation to whose service he unselfishly devoted the best years of his brave life. Neither was Ethan Allen permitted to see the admission of Vermont to the Union, but was suddenly stricken down by apoplexy, in the robust fullness of his strength, two years before that event. Noble and generous in his nature, bold, daring, and resolute, "he possessed," says Zadoc Thompson, "an unusual degree of vigor both of body and mind, and an unlimited confidence in his own abilities." Vermont has given him the first place among her heroes, has set his marble effigy in the national capitol, in her own, and on the monument that marks his grave; yet to that brave and modest soldier, Seth Warner, the knightliest figure in her romantic history, the State he served so well has not given so much as a tablet to commemorate his name and valorous deeds. It is as if, in their mouldering dust, the character of the living men was preserved, the one still self-asserting, the other as unpretentious in the eternal sleep as he was in life. Though Governor Chittenden's age was not beyond that in which modern statesmen are still active, infirmity and disease were upon him, admonishing him that he could no longer bear the fatigues of the office which for eighteen years he had held. In the summer of 1797 he announced that he would not again be a candidate for the governorship. He had seen the State, which he had been so largely instrumental in moulding out of the crude material of scattered frontier settlements, and which his strong hand had defended against covetous neighbors and a foreign enemy, in the full enjoyment of an honorable place in the sisterhood of commonwealths, and felt that his work was done. While still in office, a few weeks later, his honorable life closed at his home in Williston, among the fertile fields that his hand had wrought out of the primeval wilderness, and his death was sincerely mourned by the people whom he had so long ruled with patriarchal care.