Blessed ARE the unsuccessful, the men who have nobly striven and nobly failed. He alone is in an evil case who has set his heart on false or selfish or trivial ends. Whether he secure them or not, he is alike unsuccessful. But he who "loves high"is king in his own right, though he "live low." His plans may be abortive, but himself is sure. God may overrule his desires, and thwart his hopes, and baffle his purposes, but all things shall work together for his good. Though he fall, he shall rise again. Every defeat shall be a victory. Every calamity shall drop down blessing. Inward disappointment shall minister to enduring joy. From the grapes of sorrow he shall press the wine of life.
Theodore Winthrop died in the bud of his promise. As I write that name, hallowed from our olden time, and now baptized anew for the generations that are to follow, comes back again warm, bright, midsummer morning, freighted with woe,--that dark, sad summer morning that wrenched him away from sweet life, and left silence for song, ashes for beauty,--only cold, impassive clay, where glowing, vigorous vitality had throbbed and surged.
Scarcely had his fame risen to illumine that early grave, but, one by one, from his silent desk came those brilliant books, speaking to all who had ears to hear words of grand resolve and faith,--words of higher import than their sound,--key-words to a lofty life; for all the bravery and purity and trust and truth and tenderness that gleam in golden setting throughout his books must have been matched with bravery and purity and trust and truth and tenderness in the soul from which they sprang. Looking at what might have been accomplished with endowments so rare, culture so careful, and patience so untiring, our lament for the dead is not untinged with bitterness. A mind so well poised, so self-confident, so eager in its honorable desire for honorable fame, that, without the stimulus of publication, it could produce work after work, compact and finished, studded with gems of wit and wisdom, white and radiant with inward purity,--could polish away roughness, and toil on alone, pursuing ideal perfection, and attaining a rare excellence,--surely, here was promise of great things for the future; but it seemed otherwise to God. A poor little drummer-boy, not knowing what he did, sped a bullet straightway to as brave a heart as ever beat, and quenched a royal life.
I have spoken of Winthrop, but a thousand hearts will supply each its own name wreathed with cypress and laurel. Were these lives failures? Is not the grandeur of the sacrifice its offset? The choice of life or death is in no man's hands. The choice is only and occasionally in the manner. All must die.
To a few, and only a few, is granted the opportunity of dying martyrs. They rush on to meet the King of Terrors. They wrest the crown from his awful brow, and set it on their own triumphant. They die, not from inevitable age or irresistible disease, but in the full flush of manhood, in the very prime and zenith of life, in that glorious transition-hour when hope is culminating in fruition. They die of set purpose, with unflinching will, for God and the right. O thrice and four times happy these who bulwark liberty with their own breasts!
No common urn enshrines their sacred dust. No vulgar marble emblazons their hero-deeds. Every place which their life has touched becomes at once and forever holy ground. A nation's gratitude embalms their memory. In the generations which are to come, when we are lying in undistinguished earth, mothers shall lead their little children by the hand, and say: "Here he was born. This is the blue sky that bent over his baby head. Here he fell, fighting for his country. Here his ashes lie";--and the path thither shall be well worn, and for many and many a year there shall be hushed voices, and trembling lips, and tear-dimmed eyes. Everywhere there shall be death,--yours and mine,--but only here and there immortality,--and it is his.
So the young soldier's passing away is not untimely. The longest life can accomplish only benefaction and fame, and the life that has accomplished these has reached life's ultimatum.
It is a fair and decorous fate to devote length of days to humanity, but he who gathers up his life with all its beauty and happiness and hope, and lays it on the altar of sacrifice,--he has done all. A century of earthly existence only scatters its benefits one by one. The martyr binds his in a single bundle of life, and the offering is complete. To all noble minds fame is sweet and desirable, and threescore years and ten are all too few to carve the monument more durable than brass;but when such men as Winthrop die such death as his, we seize the tools that fall from their dying grasp, and complete the fragmentary structure, in shape more graceful, it may be, in height more majestic, in colors more lovely, than their own hands could have wrought. We attribute to them, not simply what they did, but all that they might have done. Had Winthrop lived, failing health, adverse circumstance, might have blasted his promise in the bud; but now nothing of that can ever mar his fame. We surround him with his aspirations. We glorify him with his possibilities. He is not only the knight without fear and without reproach, but the author immortal as the brightest auspices could have made his strong and growing powers. A century could not have left him greater than the love and hope and sorrow of his countrymen, building on the little that is known of his short and beautiful life, have made him.
O men and women everywhere who are following on to know the Lord, faint yet pursuing; men women who are troubled, toiling, doubting, hoping, watching, struggling; whose attainments "through the long green days, worn bare of grass and sunshine,"lag hopelessly behind your aspirations; who are haunted evermore by the ghosts of your young purposes; who see far off the shining hills your feet are fain to tread; who work your work with dumb, assiduous energy, but with perpetual protest,--I bid you good luck in the name of the Lord.
