The Choir Invisible [84]
through ignorance I had judged amiss, I feel myself in honour bound to renounce my past political convictions and to resign my membership in the Lexington Democratic Society. Nor shall I join the Democratic Society of Philadelphia, as had been my ardent purpose; and it will not be possible for me on reaching that city to act as the emissary of the Kentucky Clubs. But I shall lay before the Society the despatches of which I am the bearer. And will you lay before yours the papers herewith enclosed, containing my formal resignation with the grounds thereof carefully stated?"
To Mrs. Falconer he wrote bouyantly:
"I have crossed the Kentucky Alps, seen the American Caesar, carried away some of his gold. I came, I saw, I overcame. How do you think I met the President? I was riding toward Mount Vernon one quiet sunny afternoon and unexpectedly came upon an old gentleman who was putting up some bars that opened into a wheat-filed by the roadside. He had on long boots, corduroy smalls, a speckled red jacket, blue coat with yellow buttons, and a broad-brimmed hat. He held a hickory switch in his hand. An umbrella and a long staff were attached to his saddle-bow. His limbs were so long, large, and sinewy; his countenance so lofty, masculine, and contemplative; and although he was of a presence so statue-like and venerable that my heart with a great throb cried out, It is Washington!"
"My dear friend," he wrote at the close, "it is of no little worth to me that I should have come to Mount Vernon at this turning-point of my life. I find myself uplifted to a plane of thought and feeling higher than has ever been trod by me. When I began to draw near this place, I seemed to be mounting higher, like a man ascending a mountain; and ever since my arrival there has been this same sense of rising into a still loftier atmosphere, of surveying a vaster horizon, of beholding the juster relations of surrounding objects.
"All this feeling has its origin in my contemplation of the character of the President. You know that when a heavy sleet falls upon the Kentucky forest, the great trees crack and split, or groan and stagger, with branches snapped off or trailing. In adversity it is often so with men. But he is a vast mountain-peak, always calm, always lofty, always resting upon a base that nothing can shake; never higher, never lower, never changing; from every quarter of the earth storms have rushed in and beaten upon him; but they have passed; he is as he was. The heavens have emptied their sleets and snows on his head,--these have made him look only purer, only the more sublime.
"From the spectacle of this great man thus bearing the great burdens of his great life, a new standard of what is possible to human nature has been raised within me. I have seen with my own eyes a man whom the adverse forces of the world have not been able to wreck--a lover of perfection, who has so wrought it out in his character that to know him is to be awed into reverence of his virtues. I shall go away from him with nobler hopes of what a man may do and be.
"It is to you soley that I owe the honour of having enjoyed the personal consideration of the President. His reception of me had been in the highest degree ceremonious and distant; but upon my mentioning the names of father and brother, his manner grew warm: I had touched that trait of affectionate faithfulness with which he has always held on to every tie of kin and friendship. That your father should have fought against him and your brother under him made no difference in his memory. He had many questions to ask regarding you--your happiness, your family--to some of which I could return the answers that gave him pleasure or left him thoughtful. Upon my setting out from Mount Vernon, his last words made me the bearer of his message to you, the child of an old comrade and the sister or a gallant young soldier."
Beyond this there was nothing personal in his letter and nothing as to his return.
When she next heard, he was in Philadelphia, giving his attention to the choosing and shipment
To Mrs. Falconer he wrote bouyantly:
"I have crossed the Kentucky Alps, seen the American Caesar, carried away some of his gold. I came, I saw, I overcame. How do you think I met the President? I was riding toward Mount Vernon one quiet sunny afternoon and unexpectedly came upon an old gentleman who was putting up some bars that opened into a wheat-filed by the roadside. He had on long boots, corduroy smalls, a speckled red jacket, blue coat with yellow buttons, and a broad-brimmed hat. He held a hickory switch in his hand. An umbrella and a long staff were attached to his saddle-bow. His limbs were so long, large, and sinewy; his countenance so lofty, masculine, and contemplative; and although he was of a presence so statue-like and venerable that my heart with a great throb cried out, It is Washington!"
"My dear friend," he wrote at the close, "it is of no little worth to me that I should have come to Mount Vernon at this turning-point of my life. I find myself uplifted to a plane of thought and feeling higher than has ever been trod by me. When I began to draw near this place, I seemed to be mounting higher, like a man ascending a mountain; and ever since my arrival there has been this same sense of rising into a still loftier atmosphere, of surveying a vaster horizon, of beholding the juster relations of surrounding objects.
"All this feeling has its origin in my contemplation of the character of the President. You know that when a heavy sleet falls upon the Kentucky forest, the great trees crack and split, or groan and stagger, with branches snapped off or trailing. In adversity it is often so with men. But he is a vast mountain-peak, always calm, always lofty, always resting upon a base that nothing can shake; never higher, never lower, never changing; from every quarter of the earth storms have rushed in and beaten upon him; but they have passed; he is as he was. The heavens have emptied their sleets and snows on his head,--these have made him look only purer, only the more sublime.
"From the spectacle of this great man thus bearing the great burdens of his great life, a new standard of what is possible to human nature has been raised within me. I have seen with my own eyes a man whom the adverse forces of the world have not been able to wreck--a lover of perfection, who has so wrought it out in his character that to know him is to be awed into reverence of his virtues. I shall go away from him with nobler hopes of what a man may do and be.
"It is to you soley that I owe the honour of having enjoyed the personal consideration of the President. His reception of me had been in the highest degree ceremonious and distant; but upon my mentioning the names of father and brother, his manner grew warm: I had touched that trait of affectionate faithfulness with which he has always held on to every tie of kin and friendship. That your father should have fought against him and your brother under him made no difference in his memory. He had many questions to ask regarding you--your happiness, your family--to some of which I could return the answers that gave him pleasure or left him thoughtful. Upon my setting out from Mount Vernon, his last words made me the bearer of his message to you, the child of an old comrade and the sister or a gallant young soldier."
Beyond this there was nothing personal in his letter and nothing as to his return.
When she next heard, he was in Philadelphia, giving his attention to the choosing and shipment