He looked into her eyes, and kissed her again; and then rose up, for there was something within him like a moving of new life, which lifted him, and set him on his feet. And he stood with kindling brow, gazing into the autumn air, as his heart went sorrowing, but hopefully “sorrowing, back through all the faultful past.” And she sat on at first, and watched his face; and neither spoke nor moved for some minutes. Then she rose too, and stood by his side:
And on her lover’s arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold;
And so across the hills they went,
In that new world which is the old.
CXXXVI.
There is no recorded end of a life that I know of more entirely brave and manly than the one of Captain John Brown, of which we know every minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of our modern life not twenty years ago. About that I think there would scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie in his bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged him, recognized this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the Southern sheriff said in the wagon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness;” and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he was “allowed to die for a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”
There is no simpler or nobler record in the “Book of Martyrs,” and in passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain of liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death, “saw fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for a time. But he has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever he may send me.” And to a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to yourself to the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say, but I do not think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.”