That is the Massanutten Mountain, a spur of the Blue Ridge. How beautiful it is! Straight and smooth and even, with a little notch every now and then; clothed from base to summit with primeval forests, it looks, crested as it is here and there with snowy clouds, like a gigantic green wave rolling across the plain.
A wall not unlike this once stood on either hand in the Red Sea; and Miriam smote her tambourine in triumph, praising the God of Israel.
As we rush along, the mountain bears us company, as though doing the honors of the Valley.
The train stops at Strasburg. There, too, Massanutten ends.
As though a Titan had cleft it with his sword, so abruptly does it sink into the plain.
You are on your way to Alexandria, and will have to wait here four hours; so let us look about us. Run your eye up that sharp acclivity lying over against the town.
Upon the brink of that steep, twenty years ago, stood Gordon. Accompanied by a few staff-officers, he had spent the greater part of the day in the toilsome ascent, tearing his way through dense, pathless jungles, struggling among untrodden rocks; and now, on the seventeenth of October, 1864, he stands there sweeping the plain with his field-glass. What does he see? Why does he forget, in an instant, his fatigue? What is it that fires with ardor his martial face?
But before I tell you that, a word with you.
In the South, at the breaking out of the war, there was not to be found one solitary statesman; nor one throughout the length and breadth of the North. Not that capacity was lacking to either side. Great capacity is not required. Chesterfield heard the rumble of the coming French revolution, to which the ears of Burke were deaf. After all, statecraft is but the application of temporary expedients to temporary emergencies; and you might carve a score of Gladstones and Disraelis out of the brain of Herbert Spencer without in the least impairing his cerebrum. Pericles shone in Athens for an hour; Aristotle dominated the world for twenty centuries. Such is the measure of a statesman; such that of a thinker.
Statesmen, therefore (or the making of such), we had, I must suppose, by the thousand. I have said they were not to be found.