_not_ blind, but whose piercing glance at this hour would dart through
many a diabolical diplomatic difficulty--for ANDREW JACKSON! Oh, for the
trumpet tones of CLAY--of MARCY--for one brave blast of that dread horn
of olden time which rang so bravely to battle!

Friends, have patience. Remember that these men, and all like them, were
slowly born of great times, and that we must await time's gestation. In
this age there spring no longer heroes dragon-tooth born into full
fighting-life inside of 2.30. But so surely as stars shine in their
rounding life, or water runs, or God lives, so surely are these days of
storm and sorrow and tremendous travail bringing slowly on their
legitimate fruit of great ideas and great men. Young man--whoever you
are--be sacred to yourself now, and, for a season, serious and pure and
noble--for _who_ knows in these times to what he may grow? But a century
ago, this land lay buried in obscurity. Here and there young
land-surveyors and country store-keepers wondered that destiny had
buried them on Virginia farms and in Yankee backwoods. But war came,--no
greater than this of ours--one involving no grander principles of human
dignity and freedom,--and the young 'obscures' darted to the heaven and
took glorious places amid the constellations of fame. 'When the tale of
bricks is doubled,' says the Hebrew proverb, 'Moses comes.'

We hear much said of the honest, sturdy, no-nonsense virtues of the old
revolutionary stock, both male and female. The thing is plain
enough--they had passed through serious times and great thoughts,
through trials, and sorrows, and healthy privation, and come out strong.
Just such will be the stock of men and women born in spirit of this war.
It is making the old material over again. It was all here as good as
ever, but wanted a little stirring up, that was all. He who has seen in
the sturdy East and glorious West the unflinching honesty and
earnestness with which men are upholding this war to the knife and knife
to the hilt, as PALAFOX phrased it,--or, as the American hath
it in humbler phrase, 'from the wheel to the hub and hub to the
linch-pin,'--has no doubt that at this minute it was never so popular,
never so determined, never so thoroughly ingrained, entwined,
inter-twisted with the whole life-core and being of our people. 'We
suffer--but on with the war! Hurrah for battle--only give us victory! Do
you ask for money, arms, ships?--take all and everything to
superf