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��INTRODUCTION
��to the various events of the war. I doubt not he would rapidly have risen as a soldier, and, could he have sur- vived this struggle, the clearness of his ideas and his correct and forcible expression of them would have well fitted him to write the military memoirs of the time.
So full of life — how can we imagine him dead ? I once could have wished he might remain forever a child ; but, when he began to feel himself a man, and, on the inter- ruption of others, gently drew my arm from his waist and locked it in his own, or sat, as you and I were used to, with hand clasped in hand, though he was becoming another being, I did not wish him back again. And now it seems hard, when we heard he was not seriously wounded, and when I was planning to join in nursing him, and to supply him with comforts, and to read to him when he grew better, and when I hoped to have erelong a good carriage drive to the Mountains with him, and with you to go with us, and, when the journey had restored him to health and vigor, to bring him back to your mother in condition to enjoy life and his friends with more zest than ever, to hear after all that he is dead !
I stood by his coffin with Mr. Whipple, who had seen him but two or three times and took the strongest interest in him. After leaving a while, I came back again to stand once more by the coffin, and I laid my hand upon it, and imagined him there in communion with me once more. When they put it into the wagon, I stood by the wagon, and while there Mr. Webster came up to me, and asked if I was waiting for Edwin, who was in the church. I told him I was there because Stanley was there, and that I never had been so near to him before when he had not spoken. "But he is not there," said he, "and 'tis lucky enough that he is not nailed in there." Perhaps he
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