points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic
qualities which showed it to be not by a mere accident, but of good 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 of 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 demeanour 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