ch
more difficult to be a useful citizen. Don't seek office, but don't
"disremember" that the "useful citizen" always holds his time, his
trouble, his money, and his life ready at the hint of his country. The
useful citizen is a mighty, unpretending hero; but we are not going to
have any country very long, unless such heroism is developed. There,
what a stale sermon I'm preaching. But, being a soldier, it does seem to
me that I should like nothing so well as being a useful citizen. Well,
trying to be one, I mean. I shall stay in the service, of course, till
the war is over, or till I'm disabled; but then I look forward to a
pleasanter career.

I believe I have lost all my ambitions. I don't think I would turn my
hand to be a distinguished chemist or a famous mathematician. All I now
care about is to be a useful citizen, with money enough to buy bread
and firewood, and to teach my children to ride on horseback, and look
strangers in the face, especially Southern strangers.

There are profound and lofty lessons of patriotism and conduct in these
passages, and a very noble philosophy of life and duty both as a man
and as a citizen of a great republic. They throw a flood of light on
the great underlying forces which enabled the American people to save
themselves in that time of storm and stress. They are the utterances of
a very young man, not thirty years old when he died in battle, but much
beyond thirty in head and heart, tried and taught as he had been in a
great war. What precisely such young men thought they were fighting for
is put strikingly by Lowell's younger brother James, who was killed at
Glendale, July 4, 1862. In 1861, James Lowell wrote to his classmates,
who had given him a sword:

Those who died for the cause, not of the Constitution and the laws,--a
superficial cause, the rebels have now the same,--but of civilization
and law, and the self-restrained freedom which is their result. As the
Greeks at Marathon and Salamis, Charles Martel and the Franks at Tours,
and the Germans at the Danube, saved Europe from Asiatic barbarism, so
we, at places to be famous in future times, shall have saved America
from a similar tide of barbarism; and we may hope to be purified and
strengthened ourselves by the struggle.

This is a remarkable passage and a deep thought. Coming from a young
fellow of twenty-four, it is amazing. But the fiery trial of the times
taught fiercely and fast, and James Lowell, just out of colle