men who snuff the scent of battle from afar, and take delight in carnage and destruction. There are some to whom, rejoicing in the possession and exercise of physical strength, the struggle and the contest are a gratification. But he was a student, whose intellect had been trained in the schools of Europe, and whose hours of leisure were given to the retirement of the closet. He was one whose talent, encouraged by the world wide celebrity, merited and won by an older brother,[1] would naturally seek to gain its laurels in the quiet paths of literature, rather than amid the storm and tumult of war. His youth had been spent and his ideas formed among a people whose creed it is that wrath is oftener turned aside by a soft answer than conquered by heavy blows. The doctrines of his ancestry, and the early teachings of the good mother who bent over his cradle, were those of peace.
But the time came when considerations such as these were as the green withes that bound Sampson. The books over which he had pored in the past — ambition that was pointing ahead to the smiling future — even the cherished opinions of his forefathers were forgotten. A blow had had been given at Charleston, and his country was calling upon her sons to come to the rescue. These placid valleys that seventy years before he was born had been trodden by the revolutionary armies, were again disturbed. The Quaker hills that had echoed with the thunders of the battle of Brandywine, now rang with a bugle blast from the Potomac. The summons was answered by the tap of the drum and the tread of the hurrying feet. The dragon's teeth had been scattered widely, and from every nook and corner of this broad land, sprang forth armed men. The Friend in his drab coat, and using his plain
- ↑ Mr. Bayard Taylor.
