The Choir Invisible

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.