May 11.—I note this as being one of the gloomiest days since the war. News has just been received that one of our brightest stars has left us; he has gone to shine in a more glorious sphere than this. The good and great General Stonewall Jackson has fallen; he was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville, and lived a few days afterward. When I first heard of it I was speechless, and thought, with the apostle, “how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways are past finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord.” Dark and mysterious indeed, are his ways. Who dare attempt to fathom them, when such men as Jackson are cut down in the zenith of their glory, and at the very hour of their country’s need?
The honor of taking this great man’s life was not reserved for the foe, but for his own men, as if it were a sacrifice they offered to the Lord, as Jephtha gave up his daughter.
“Is there one who hath thus, through his orbit of life,
But at distance, observed him through glory, through blame,
In the calm of retreat, in the grandeur of strife,
Whether shining or clouded, still high and the same.
O no, not a heart that e’er knew him but mourns
Deep, deep o’er the grave, where such glory is ‘shrined,
O’er a monument Fame will preserve, ‘mong the urns
Of the wisest, the bravest, the best of mankind!”
