354 Southern Historical Society Papers,
REV. DR. W. H. MILBURN, THE BLIND CHAPLAIN OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
I know not that my idea of General Lee's character can be better expressed than in these lines from Wordsworth :
" Whose high endeavors were inward light. That made the path before him always bright ; Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace, Who through the heat of conflict kept the law. In calmness made and saw what he forsaw ; Or if an unexpected call succeed. Come when it would, was equal to the need. He who though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence. Is yet a soul, whose master bias leans To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes : Sweet images which, wheresoe'er he be. Are ever at his heart, and such fidelity It is his darling passion to approve ; More brave for this, that he hath much to love."
W. H. MiLBURN. Washington, D, C,
A. K. m'CLURE, PHILADELPHIA ** TIMES.
General Robert E. Lee will go into impartial history as the greatest of all the Southern chieftains, and as second to none. North or South, in all the grander qualities of heroism. When the yet lingering pas- sions of civil war shall have perished he will be remembered, not so much as a Southern as an American chieftain. With his exceptional skill as a great commander, conceded by all, his personal attributes will grow brighter and brighter in the lustrous annals of American heroism. In all the bitter asperities of fractional conflict the charac- ter of General Lee as a humane and Christian warrior was ever unblemished and his integrity unquestioned. However the North and the South may differ as to the war, the heroism of both the blue and the gray will become the pride of all sections, and then the name of Lee must be linked with the foremost in American rever- ence.
A. K. McClure.
Philadelphia^ Pa,
