she

the convictions of Massachusetts are in these swarming populations, I think the little state bigger than I knew. When her blood is up, has a fist big enough to knock down an empire. And her blood was roused. Scholars changed the black coat for the blue. A single company in the Forty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment contained thirty-five sons of Harvard. You all know as well as I the story of these dedicated men, who knew well on what duty they went,

I

whose fathers and mothers said of each slaughtered son, "We gave him up when he enlisted." One mother said, when her son was offered the command of the first negro regiment, "If he accepts it, I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot." These men, thus tender, thus high-bred, thus peaceable, were always in the front and always employed. They might say, with their forefathers the old Norse Vikings, "We sung the mass of lances from morning until évening." And in how many cases it chanced, when the hero had fallen, they who came by night to his funeral, on the morrow returned to the war-path to show his slayers the way to death! ...

¡Ah! young brothers, all honor and gratitude to you, you, manly defenders, Liberty's and

we thank

Humanity's bodyguard! We shall not again disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. We see you for it-a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure and all the lives it has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this genera

tion of American men, if they had been demanded.1

XVII

ADDRESS

AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS' MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867

“THEY have shown what men may do,
They have proved how men may die,

Count, who can, the fields they have pressed,

Each face to the solemn sky!"

THINK you these felt no charms

In their gray homesteads and embowered farms?
In household faces waiting at the door

Their evening step should lighten up no more?
In fields their boyish feet had known?

In trees their fathers' hands had set,
And which with them had grown,
Widening each year their leafy coronet ?
Felt they no pang of passionate regret

For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own
These things are dear to every man that lives,

And life prized more for what it lends than gives.

Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet,

Strove to detain their fatal feet;

And yet the enduring half they chose,

Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,

The invisible things of God before the seen and known:
Therefore their memory inspiration blows

With echoes gathering on from zone to zone;
For manhood is the one immortal thing
Beneath Time's changeful sky,

And, where it lightened once, from age to age,
Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,
That length of days is knowing when to die."

LOWELL, Concord Ode.