Drawing his sword from patriotic impulse, without ambition and without malice, he wielded it without vindictiveness, and sheathed it without reproach.  All that humanity could conceive he did to suppress the cruelties of war and soothe its sorrows.  He never struck a coward’s blow.  To him age, infancy, and helplessness were ever sacred.  He tolerated no extremity unless to curb the excesses of his enemy, and he never poisoned the sting of defeat by the exultation of the conqueror.

Peace he welcomed as a heaven-sent herald of friendship; and no country has given him greater honor than that which he defeated; for England has been glad to claim him as the scion of her blood, and proud, like our sister American States, to divide with Virginia the honor of producing him.

Fascinated by the perfection of the man, we are loath to break the mirror of admiration into the fragments of analysis.  But, lo! as we attempt it, every fragment becomes the miniature of such sublimity and beauty that the destructive hand can only multiply the forms of immortality.

Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington.  He was no Veiled Prophet.  He never acted a part.  Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us—­a fair and open manuscript.  He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it.  He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech—­the consummate tact of direct attention.  Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service.  There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime.

A true son of nature was George Washington—­of nature in her brightest intelligence and noblest mold; and the difficulty, if such there be, in comprehending him, is only that of reviewing from a single standpoint the vast procession of those civil and military achievements which filled nearly half a century of his life, and in realizing the magnitude of those qualities which were requisite to their performance—­the difficulty of fashioning in our minds a pedestal broad enough to bear the towering figure, whose greatness is diminished by nothing but the perfection of its proportions.  If his exterior—­in calm, grave, and resolute repose—­ever impressed the casual observer as austere and cold, it was only because he did not reflect that no great heart like his could have lived unbroken unless bound by iron nerves in an iron frame.  The Commander of Armies, the Chief of a People, the Hope of Nations could not wear his heart upon his sleeve; and yet his sternest