On the opposite page is the photograph of a dear visitor to our family, General Lafayette. We never cared to inquire whether he was a relation or not. He was just as good to us as an own brother. He first came to see us when we were poor and needed friends. He had great difficulty in reaching us, as his own government gave orders to stop him. His young bride, equally noble in her nature, encouraged his coming. He was obliged to escape from France into Spain, and in a Spanish port to take passage in a Spanish ship, the only cargo of any value, except that made up of Columbus and his one hundred and twenty men from Palos in 1492, that ever came to us from the land of the Cid. The spirited young marquis remained with us from 1777 to 1781, fighting among our bravest, suffering privations with the most patriotic, confided in and beloved by Washington and the best of the Revolution. He made us two visits after the war, once in 1784, and the second time just forty years later, upon a special invitation of the nation. Proud and glad were we all to see him. The most wonderful part of the story is, that, after enduring vigorous hand-shaking through each of our then twenty-four States, and kissing all the children from two years old and upwards, he survived the job ten years.
We must now turn over the leaves rapidly, catching quick, pleasant glances at the fine, pale scholarly features of the pure-minded John Jay, and, on the opposite side, of the handsome face and form of his accomplished wife Sallie Livingston, who mated him when he was only nineteen, and consoled his heart and invigorated his head for twenty-eight eventful years, during which his inflexible patriotism, solid judgment, and weighty learning placed him by the side of Washington and John Adams in the estimation of the American household.
Then come the bluff face of hearty old Israel Putnam, whose expression bears the clearly read inscription carved on his tombstone, “He dared to lead where any dared to follow”; the massed, trustworthy head of Nathaniel Greene, with its square, Quaker characteristics; Francis Marion’s calm, lucid, telescopic eyes, and his farmer-like breadth of front, animated by the dash which egged him, when in the saddle, to plucky marches; and a long procession of valiant men and noble women,—family portraits in our national home gallery,—which gem and illuminate our collection and summon fresh pride to our patriotism, and new pleasures, on each review, to our hearts.
It is quite needless to suggest that here, too, are the well-preserved effigies of those Wise Men whom we saw together on the summit of July 4, 1776, and whose remembered figures flitted often through the varied scenes of the Revolution and alighted in the green boughs, of our memories.
Some of these faces are singularly handsome, illuminated with the beauty of great purposes. Some, however, are rugged as hillocks, rich in mould but unsubdued by the plough of culture or the spade of refining taste. Some few hide mean purposes behind great, rotund cheekiness; others tell a mixed story of joy and suffering; a few ache with ambitions unsatisfied; still fewer awe us by a Titanic distress; but most are firm with earnest, resolute convictions spiked with will and riveted to the wide aims of continental purposes.
Here and there come in faces of great softness, sweetness, and delicacy, in which feminine grace and dignity are blent so holily; the mothers, wives, or sisters of the men of the Revolution and who kept alive in their own loving hearts faith in God, their kinsmen, and themselves; faces which plainly say,
“This is a haunted world. It hath no breeze
But is the echo of some voice beloved;
Its pines have human tones; its billows wear
The color and the sparkle of dear eyes.