The writer of these letters needs no additional eulogy.  He sacrificed all the prospects of his life to give his services in our struggle for freedom.  He, too, was but one of that innumerable multitude who, in more exalted or in humbler stations, freely gave their exertions, their wealth, their comfort, and their lives for freedom and right.  It is possible so to linger by the grave of the past as to forget the living present; but the grateful memory of those who have in their times contended for truth with self-denial should be ever animating to those now laboring in the holy warfare, to which, in every age, whether the outward signs be of peace or strife, God calls the noble of mankind.

  “Therefore bring violets!  Yet, if we,
      self-balked,
    Stand still a-strewing violets all the while,
  These had as well not moved, ourselves not
      talked
    Of these.”

* * * * *

IN THE PINES.

If I were a crow, or, at least, had the faculty of flying with that swift directness which is proverbially attributed to the corvine tribe, and were to wing a southwesterly course from the truck of the flag-staff which rises from the Battery at New York, I should find myself, within a very short time, about fifty miles from the turbulent city, and hovering over a region of country as little like the civilized emporium just quitted as it is well possible to conceive.  Not being a crow, however, nor fitted up with an apparatus for flying,—­destitute even of a balloon,—­I am compelled to adopt the means of locomotion which the bounty of God or the ingenuity of man affords me, and to spend a somewhat longer time in transit to my destination.

Over the New Jersey Railroad, then, I rattled, one fine, sunshiny autumn morning, in the year that has recently taken leave of us, as far as Bordentown, a distance of some fifty-seven miles, on my way to a locality the very existence of which is scarcely dreamed of by thousands in the metropolis, who can tell you how many square miles of malaria there are in the Roman Campagna, and who have got the topography of Caffre Land at their fingers’ ends.  It is a region aboriginal in savagery, grand in the aspects of untrammelled Nature; where forests extend in uninterrupted lines over scores of miles; where we may wander a good day’s journey without meeting half-a-dozen human faces; where stately deer will bound across our path, and bears dispute our passage through the cedar-brakes; where, in a word, we may enjoy the undiluted essence, the perfect wildness, of woodland life.  Deep and far “under the shade of melancholy boughs” we shall be taken, if together we visit the ancient Pines of New Jersey.

In order to do so, we must make at Bordentown the acquaintance of Mr. Cox, and take our seats in his stage for a jolt, twelve miles long, to the village of New Egypt, on the frontier of the Pines.  Although the forest is accessible from many points, and may be entered by a number of distinct approaches, I, the writer hereof, selected that via New Egypt as the most convenient to a comer from New York, and as, perhaps, the least fatiguing to accomplish.