ood right, that he had won a distinguished
name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by
an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required
an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles
to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the
man to give out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his
nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that
flashes and flickers in a blaze; but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of
iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness; this was the expression
of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him, at
the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under
some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness,--roused
by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken all his energies that were
not dead, but only slumbering,--he was yet capable of flinging off his
infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of age to seize
a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so
intense a moment, his demeanor would have still been calm. Such an
exhibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be
anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him--as evidently as the
indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga already cited as the most
appropriate simile--were the features of stubborn and ponderous
endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier
days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a
somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable and unmanageable as a
ton of iron ore; and of benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the
bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine
a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of
the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I
know,--certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep
of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its
triumphant energy;--but, be that as it might, there was never in his
heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's
wing. I have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more
confidently make an appeal.

Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch--must have vanished, or
been obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful
attri