To men who die for her on land and sea
That you might have a country great and free,
Boston rears this. Build you their monument
In lives like theirs at duty’s summons spent.
The woman’s Confederate monument in Charleston, S. C., bears an inscription beginning thus:
This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the instincts of their birth, faithful to the teachings of their fathers, constant in their love for the State, died in the performance of their duty; who have glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of suffering and the heroism of death, and who in the dark hours of imprisonment, in the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short, sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the belief that at home they would not be forgotten.
George Eliot
The inscription on the granite obelisk which forms George Eliot’s gravestone, besides recording her pseudonym and real name, with the dates of birth and death, bears the first lines of her poem, commencing:
Oh may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again