He speaks next of the stateliness of the trees, which suggests to him
the stateliness of the two great heroes of the Confederacy,
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, -- "bright, magnificent exemplars
of stateliness, -- those noble figures that arose and moved
in splendid procession across the theatre of our Confederate war!"
The patience of the river suggests the soldiers who walked
their life of battle, "patient through heat and cold,
through rain and drought, through bullets and diseases,
through hunger and nakedness, through rigor of discipline
and laxity of morals, ay, through the very shards and pits of hell,
down to the almost inevitable death that awaited them."
--
* `Retrospects and Prospects', p. 94.
--
The most significant passage, however, is his appeal to the men and women
of the South to rise to the plane of tranquillity and magnanimity: --
"I spoke next of the tranquillity of the over-spanning heavens.
This, too, is a noble quality which your Association tends to keep alive.
Who in all the world needs tranquillity more than we?
I know not a deeper question in our Southern life at this present time,
than how we shall bear our load of wrong and injury
with the calmness and tranquil dignity that become men and women
who would be great in misfortune; and believe me, I know not where
we will draw deeper inspirations of calm strength for this great emergency
than in this place where we now stand, in the midst of departed heroes
who fought against these things to death.
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