Shall we build to the purple of Pride, And here's neither dress nor adornment allowed, But the long winding sheet and the fringe of the shroud. To Riches? Alas! 'tis in vain; Who hid in their turns have been hid; And here in the grave are all metals forbid To the pleasures which mirth can afford? Ah! here is a plentiful board! But the guests are all mute as their pitiful cheer, And none but the worm is a reveller here. Shall we build to Affection and Love? Ah no! they have withered and died, Friends, brothers, and sisters are laid side by side, Unto Sorrow?-the dead cannot grieve; Which Compassion itself could relieve. Ah! sweetly they slumber, nor love, hope, or fear; Peace! peace is the watchword, the only one here. Unto Death, to whom monarchs must bow? And here there are trophies enow! Beneath the cold dead, and around the dark stone, Are the signs of a sceptre that none may disown The first tabernacle to Hope we will build, And look for the sleepers around us to rise! The second to Faith, which insures it fulfilled; And the third to the Lamb of the great sacrifice, Who bequeathed us them both, when He rose to the skies. WADE HAMPTON. Address at a Confederate reunion at Lanford Station, April 16, 1906. Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen: I esteem it a great privilege to be here today, and to have the opportunity of looking into the faces of this audience, and of grasping the time-worn, but true hands of a few at least of my comrades and companions of the days now long gone by. I am on ground that was familiar to me in my boyhood, and there is hardly a spot in all this region that is not associated with memories of the long ago. To me the Enoree murmurs perpetually of the past, and these hills and ravines have tongues that speak of forms and faces long since vanished, and all around my ear catches the echoes long since hushed in the stillness of the buried years. In the tide of war and time and change, whole ranks of the true, the beautiful and the brave have gone down to death, and only a small remnant of us are left today to tell the tale. My old comrades, God has dealt very kindly with you and me. Old age has come on as softly as the snowflakes fall on the mountain peaks, and as gently as the shadows of evening creep over hill and plain. The thin gray line that survived the march, the bivouac, and the battle, is fast yielding to the onset of the years, and we who are left are closing up for the last struggle against the last enemy. In that struggle we shall go down, but not forever. No; somewhere in God's glorious dominions we shall pitch our tents again with our comrades gone before, and rejoice in a victory that shall endure forever. For the true, the faithful and the brave, the battle of life must end in a triumph compared with which all the glories of earthly battles will fade into insignificance. It is very gratifying to me to see so many young people here today. I take it for granted that they have come to honor the memory of their fathers and that their presence shows that the spirit of the past is still alive. In behalf of my comrades I welcome them with my whole heart, and urge them to keep alive the spirit of their fathers, and to cherish as a sacred trust the ideals of a glorious past. It is for them that I shall speak today and not for you, my comrades. There is no necessity for me to speak to you. You know as much about war as I can tell you, and there is little more that lies before you and me. I know not better how to hold up before the young men ideals of Southern manhood than by a concrete example, and to this end I want to talk to you just for a few minutes about one of the great leaders in the war and one of the loftiest types of Southern valor and true manhood that our State has ever produced. I mean Wade Hampton. My young friends, God only knows how much you owe today to Wade Hampton-how dark might have been your prospects in life, how narrow your sphere of action, how limited your opportunities, how low and degraded your associations, if there had been no Wade Hampton to answer when a down-trodden people in the throes of desperation called for a leader. The world now knows, or may know, that there was a time when he stood between your fathers and all that brutal, conscienceless power can inflict,— power blind with fury, drunk with excesses, chanting its infernal orgies among the ruins of the temple of virtue, holding a wild carnival amid the wreck of wealth and over the prostrate spirit of truth, decency and honor, and feeding and fattening like vast flocks of black carrion crows or hungry myriads of mustering vampires upon the very vitals and viscera of the land. Between your fathers and such a hydra-headed power as this, gloating in the wild exuberance of unrestrained license, he stood-stood for five long weary months like a column of granite in mid ocean with the tempest howling around it and the heaving billows in all their mad fury dashing against it in vain. It is impossible for me in a short talk-and I intend this one shall be short-to present Hampton in his three-fold sphere of citizen, soldier, and statesAny one of these spheres would furnish abundant material for the pen of the historian, the fancy of the romancer, or the tongue of the orator. And on the background of each, there is his sublime manhood standing out in bold outline-one of those grand, majestic human figures that now and then move over the face of this world and ennoble, dignify, and glorify mankind. To my mind Hampton, the dashing, daring, yet cool and skilful cavalry leader; Hampton, the strong, wise, far-seeing, imperturbable patriot and statesman, must yield precedence to Hampton in his exalted, peerless, uncompromising manhood; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was because he was all man from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, from the innermost chambers of his heart out to the tips of his fingers that he was the glorious warrior and the peerless statesman. He was an aristocrat by birth and a gentleman by instinct. I use the word aristocrat in its true |