Homer makes his hero, like Saul, a head and shoulders taller than the soldiers around him. And Egyptian artists paint their conquering monarch twenty times as tall as the pigmy enemy whom he is destroying at a single blow.
True greatness is more than stature.
(1301)
Upon his return to Washington, Grant made preparations to leave immediately for the West, but at the close of a consultation with the President and the Secretary of War, he was informed that Mrs. Lincoln expected his presence the same evening at a military dinner to be given in his honor, at which twelve distinguished officers, then in the city, were to be present. Frank B. Carpenter, who was then at the White House, working on his celebrated painting, “Lincoln and His Cabinet,” says Grant turned to the President and said that it would be impossible for him to remain over as he must be in Tennessee at a given time. The President insisted that he could not be excused, and here we have another manifestation of Grant’s independence and willpower. He said to Lincoln: “But the time is very precious just now, and really, Mr. President, I believe I have had enough of this show business.”
So, while the man of deeds—indifferent to blandishments and caring nothing for receptions—was speeding on his way to Nashville to meet Sherman and talk over the momentous business of trying to end the war, the twelve “distinguished” officers were banqueted without a guest of honor. But perhaps in the feasting and the merrymaking of the night, they could not but ponder over the strange things which had come to pass that day—a general so devoted to his duties in the field as to have no time or desire to be received by Congress or banqueted by the wife of a President; a man who had been out of the position of a common store-clerk hardly three years, given command of all the Union forces on land and sea; a great load lifted from the long-burdened heart of Lincoln; the bells of time ringing in a better day for the cause of the Union.—Col. Nicholas Smith, “Grant, the Man of Mystery.”
(1302)
GREATNESS APPRECIATED
Mr. Moore, writing in The Congregationalist on “The Benediction of a Statue,” says:
The man was only one of the thousands that have stopt for a moment or two at least in front of the Phillips Brooks statue during the past week. He was a working man of about fifty, with a strong, square-jawed, bronzed face. He had evidently come over to look at the statue during the noon hour, for he had on his blue flannel shirt and carpenter’s overalls. He gazed a moment and then brushed his eyes rather furtively.