These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or griefs.  I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice addressed me by name.  I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time.  I should have yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might well call forth.

“You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once in Boston?”

“I do remember him well.”

“He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown.  I am carrying his body back with me on this train.  He was my only child.  If you could come to my house,—­I can hardly call it my home now,—­it would be a pleasure to me.”

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a “New System of Latin Paradigms,” a work showing extraordinary scholarship and capacity.  It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth.  Some time afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course of independent study he was proposing to himself.  I was most happy to smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge.  He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth.  Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men’s chambers.  For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural.  Yet he spoke to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil sacred forever.  Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years.  He has done better, for he has died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come once more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same region I had left!  No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own.  I thought of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by Evangeline upon the great river.  Ah, me! if that railroad crash had been a few hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so close to each other!