A rich and well-stored mind is the only true philosopher’s stone, extracting pure gold from all the base material around. It can create its own beauty, wealth, power, happiness. It has no dreary solitudes. The past ages are its possession, and the long line of the illustrious dead are all its friends.
George Davis
May Twenty-Sixth
Cease firing! There are here no foes to fight!
Grim war is o’er and smiling peace now reigns;
Cease useless strife—no matter who was right—
True magnanimity from hate abstains.
Cease firing!
Major William Meade Pegram
The last Confederate army, under General Kirby Smith, surrenders at Baton Rouge, 1865
May Twenty-Seventh
Representing nothing on God’s earth now,
And naught in the water below it,
As a pledge of a nation that’s dead and gone,
Keep it, dear Captain, and show it.
Show it to those who will lend an ear
To the tale this paper can tell
Of liberty born, of the patriot’s dream,
Of a storm-cradled nation that fell.
Too poor to possess the precious ores,
And too much of a stranger to borrow,
We issued to-day our promise to pay,
And hoped to repay on the morrow.
Major S. A. Jonas
(From “Lines on the back of a Confederate note”)
May Twenty-Eighth