"LAFAYETTE."

Here, away from the noise of the city, amid silence chaste and sweet,
without a monument, lie the remains of one of the greatest men of
France. Not in Pere la Chaise, amid grandeur and fashion, but in a
little private cemetery, with a cluster of extinguished nobles on one
side, and a band of victims of the reign of terror on the other!

We sat down beside his tomb, grateful to the dust beneath our feet for
the noble assistance which it gave to the sinking "Old Thirteen," when
the soul of Lafayette animated it. How vividly were the days of our long
struggle before us. We saw Bunker Hill alive with battalions, and
Charlestown lay in flames. Step by step we ran over the bitter struggle,
with so much power on one side, and on the other such an amount of
determination, but after all so many dark and adverse circumstances, so
little physical power in comparison with the hosts arrayed against us.
It was when the heart of the nation drooped with an accumulation of
misfortune, that Lafayette came and turned the balance in the scales.
And we were grateful to him; not so much for what he really
accomplished, as for what he attempted--for the daring spirit, the noble
generosity!

Then, too, I thought how Lafayette stood between the king and the
people, before and after the reign of terror--thought of his devotion to
France--of his stern patriotism, which would neither tremble before a
king nor an infuriated rabble. Yet he was obliged to fly for life from
Paris--from France. He lay in a felon's dungeon in a foreign land, for
lack of devotion to kingcraft, and could not return to France because he
loved humanity too well. Was it not hard?