might eventually win a competence, the most ardent ambition could
hardly hope for more. Never was an obscure existence more
irretrievably marked out than for these children of the Ohio; and
yet, before either had grown grey, the names of Abraham Lincoln,
President of the United States, and of Stonewall Jackson,
Lieutenant-General in the Confederate Army, were household words in
both America and Europe. Descendants of the pioneers, those hardy
borderers, half soldiers and half farmers, who held and reclaimed,
through long years of Indian warfare, the valleys and prairies of the
West, they inherited the best attributes of a frank and valiant race.
Simple yet wise, strong yet gentle, they were gifted with all the
qualities which make leaders of men. Actuated by the highest
principles, they both ennobled the cause for which they fought; and
while the opposition of such kindred natures adds to the dramatic
interest of the Civil War, the career of the great soldier, although
a theme perhaps less generally attractive, may be followed as
profitably as that of the great statesmen. Providence dealt with them
very differently. The one was struck down by a mortal wound before
his task was well begun; his life, to all human seeming, was given in
vain, and his name will ever be associated with the mournful memories
of a lost cause and a vanished army. The other, ere he fell beneath
the assassin's stroke, had seen the abundant fruits of his mighty
labours; his sun set in a cloudless sky. And yet the resemblance
between them is very close. Both dared:

For that sweet mother-land which gave them birth
Nobly to do, nobly to die. Their names,
Graven on memorial columns, are a song
Heard in the future;...more than wall
And rampart, their examples reach a hand