And feeble are the steps
That so patiently they feel;
And they kiss with trembling lips
The old Bible and the seal;
And they lay with care away,
In wallets old and worn,
The scant and tardy pay
Of a life of toil and scorn.
They love a cheerful pipe
And a warm place in the sun,
From an age so old and ripe
To call memories one by one;—
To tell of Arnold's crime,
And of Washington's proud form
That beamed, in battle time,
A beacon o'er the storm.—
To tell of Yorktown's day,
When the closing fight was gained,—
When Cornwallis went away
And the eagle was unchained;
To show us, o'er and o'er,
The seamed and withered scars
That many a hero bore,
As his passport from the wars.
'Tis pride, with these old men,
To tell what they have seen,
Of battle-fields, again
With their harvest bright and green:
'Twill be pride, when we are old,
To say that in our youth
We heard the tales they told
And looked on them in their truth.
They are the last sad link
Of a race of men with ours,
Who stood on ruin's brink
And built up fair freedom's towers.
They are passing, as the foam
From the ocean wave departs,
But finding yet a home
In heaven, and in our hearts.
And when the last is gone,
To their memory we will build
A pyramid of stone
Whose top the sun shall gild
When the name of patriot weal
And of tyrants' bitter wrong
Shall be told but in a tale
And known but in a song.
The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created, almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.
Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah, well-a-day!—poor —— is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must all follow him—some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six—to four—to three—to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!—enough gone to mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy converse! And then one day there came but one, who looked vacantly round on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then been written, and Geoffry Dale was yet to spring from the imagination or the memory of the dramatist and supply poor Jesse Rural Blake with one of his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand, months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time of his companions. But no—death had come to all, and as yet no resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free and to cover with human glory!
Perhaps they died in good time—before the dark hour came back again after a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule, in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.
Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the Revolution—the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part in that throe which gave birth to a nation,—tread all those who can even say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal recollection is growing thin,—it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is silence."