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[157] throng upon the memory. The names of Stuart, Ashby, Morgan, Cleburne, and their compeers spring from the full heart to the lip. Would that time permitted me to call that brilliant roll of the living and the dead; but why need the voice pronounce what all would speak? Men judge Napoleon by his marshals; judge Jefferson Davis and his chosen chieftains, and the plea of words seems weak indeed by the side of Men and Deeds. Troop behind them those armies of ‘tattered uniforms and bright musket’—but no, it is beyond the reach of either brush or chisel to redeem to the imagination such men, such scenes, as shine in their twenty-two hundred combats and battles. Not until some new-born Homer shall touch the harp can mankind be penetrated by a sense of their heroic deeds, and then alone in the grand majestic minstrelsy of epic song.
Richmond, VA. 1889.
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