mortal, and died, by what
seemed mere accident, at the age of thirty-two,--died, the master of an
empire, conquered by himself, covering two millions and a half of square
miles,--died, in the full vigor of his faculties, at the time his brain
was teeming with magnificent schemes of assimilating the populations of
Europe and Asia, and of remaking man after his own image by stamping the
nature of Alexander on the mind and feelings of the world.

One incident, the type of his career, has passed into the most familiar
of proverbs. When, in his invasion of Asia, he arrived at Gordium, he
was arrested, not by an army, but by something mightier than an
army,--namely, a superstition. Here was the rude wagon of Gordius, the
yoke of which was fastened to the pole by a cord so entangled that no
human wit or patience could untwist it; yet the oracle had declared that
the empire of Asia was reserved to him alone by whom it should be
untied. After vainly attempting to overcome its difficulties with his
fingers, Alexander impatiently cut it with his sword. The multitude
applauded the solution; he soon made it good by deeds; and, in action,
youth has ever since shown its judgment, as well as its vigor, in thus
annihilating seemingly hopeless perplexities, by cutting Gordian knots.

In passing from the field of battle to the field of politics, from young
men as warriors to young men as statesmen, we must bear in mind that
high political station, unless a man is born to it, is rarely reached by
political genius, until political genius has been tried by years and
tested by events. At the time Mr. Calhoun's influence was greatest, at
the time it was said that "when he took snuff all South Carolina
sneezed," he was really not so great a man as when he was struggling for
eminence. Statesmen are thus forces long before they are leaders of
party, prime-ministers, and presidents; and are not the energies
employed in preparing the way for new laws and new policies of more
historic significance than the mere outward form of their enactment and
inauguration? Thus, it required thirty-five years of effort and
agitation before the old Earl Grey of 1832 could accomplish the scheme
of Parliamentary reform eagerly pressed by the young Mr. Grey of 1797.
The young Chatham, when he was merely "that terrible cornet of horse,"
whose rising to speak in the House of Commons was said to give Sir
Robert Walpole "a pain in the back,"--when, in his own sarcastic p