In such an airy, sportive vein he wrote, with the firm purpose and the distinct thought visible under the sparkle.  Before the regiment left Washington, as he has recorded, he said good-bye and went down the bay to Fortress Monroe.  Of his unshrinking and sprightly industry, his good head, his warm heart, and cool hand, as a soldier, General Butler has given precious testimony to his family.  “I loved him as a brother,” the General writes of his young aid.

The last days of his life at Fortress Monroe were doubtless also the happiest.  His energy and enthusiasm, and kind, winning ways, and the deep satisfaction of feeling that all his gifts could now be used as he would have them, showed him and his friends that his day had at length dawned.  He was especially interested in the condition and fate of the slaves who escaped from the neighboring region and sought refuge at the fort.  He had never for an instant forgotten the secret root of the treason which was desolating the land with war; and in his view there would be no peace until that root was destroyed.  In his letters written from the fort he suggests plans of relief and comfort for the refugees; and one of his last requests was to a lady in New York for clothes for these poor pensioners.  They were promptly sent, but reached the fort too late.

As I look over these last letters, which gush and throb with the fulness of his activity, and are so tenderly streaked with touches of constant affection and remembrance, yet are so calm and duly mindful of every detail, I do not think with an elder friend, in whom the wisdom of years has only deepened sympathy for all generous youthful impulse, of Virgil’s Marcellus, “Heu, miserande puer!” but I recall rather, still haunted by Philip Sidney, what he wrote, just before his death, to his father-in-law, Walsingham,—­“I think a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part truly.”

The sketches of the campaign in Virginia, which Winthrop had commenced in this magazine, would have been continued, and have formed an invaluable memoir of the places, the men, and the operations of which he was a witness and a part.  As a piece of vivid pictorial description, which gives the spirit as well as the spectacle, his “Washington as a Camp” is masterly.  He knew not only what to see and to describe, but what to think; so that in his papers you are not at the mercy of a multitudinous mass of facts, but understand their value and relation.  Immediately upon his arrival at Fort Monroe he had commenced a third article, which was to have occupied the place of this.  It is inserted here just as he left it, with one brief addition only to make his known meaning more clear.  The part called “Voices of the Contraband” was written previously, and is not paged in the manuscript.  It was to have been introduced into the article; but it is placed first here, that the sequence of the paper, as far as the author had written it, may remain undisturbed.