AMERICA'S CHARACTERISTIC LANDSCAPE

Speaking generally as to the capacity and sure future destiny of that plain and prairie area (larger than any European kingdom) it is the inexhaustible land of wheat, maize, wool, flax, coal, iron, beef and pork, butter and cheese, apples and grapes-land of ten million virgin farms— to the eye at present wild and unproductive yet experts say that upon it when irrigated may easily be grown enough wheat to feed the world. Then as to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling,) while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara falls, the upper Yellowstone and the like, afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape.

Indeed through the whole of this journey, with all its shows and varieties, what most impress'd me, and will longest remain with me, are these same prairies. Day after day, and night after night, to my eyes, to all my senses the esthetic one most of all - they silently and broadly unfolded. Even their simplest statistics are sublime.

[From Specimen Days and Collect, "America's Characteristic Landscape." Prose Works, p. 150.]

THE SILENT GENERAL

Sept. 28, '79.- So General Grant, after circumambiating the world, has arrived home again — landed in San Francisco yesterday, from the ship City of Tokio from Japan. What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration — his life — of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. Cynical critics are wondering "what the people can see in Grant" to make such a hubbub about. They aver (and it is no doubt true) that he has hardly the average of our day's literary and scholastic culture, and absolutely no pronounc'd genius or conventional eminence of any sort. Correct: but he proves how an average

western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities, (history has presented none more trying, no born monarch's, no mark more shining for attack or envy,) may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, carrying the country and himself with credit year after year — command over a million armed men fight more than fifty heavy battles — rule for eight years a land larger than all the kingdoms of Europe combined and then, retiring, quietly (with a cigar in his mouth) make the promenade of the whole world, through its courts and coteries, and kings and czars and mikados, and splendidest glitters and etiquettes, as phlegmatically as he ever walk'd the portico of a Missouri hotel after dinner. I say all this is what people like and I am sure I like it. Seems to me it transcends Plutarch. How these old Greeks, indeed, would have seized on him! A mere plain man — no art, no poetry — only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to do, what devolv'd upon him. A common trader, money-maker, tanner, farmer of Illinois general for the republic, in its terrific struggle with itself, in the war of attempted secession President following, (a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself) — nothing heroic, as the authorities put it The and yet the greatest hero. gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him.

[From Specimen Days and Collect, "The Silent General." Prose Works,

pp. 153, 154.]

ULYSSES S. GRANT

[Hiram Ulysses Grant was born at Point Pleasant, in southern Ohio, April 27, 1822. His father, Jesse R. Grant, was a young tanner of good family, who soon afterward set up in business for himself in Georgetown, Ohio. Grant spent the first seventeen years of his life in and about Georgetown. He was appointed to West Point in 1839, and was entered by mistake as Ulysses S. Grant. He graduated at the middle of his class in 1843. He passed through the Mexican war, serving gallantly, being twice breveted for distinguished action. He served six years at northern posts, resigning, in 1854, from Humboldt Bay, Cal. He reëntered service as colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers, in 1861, and in four years rose to the sole command of the armies of the United States. He was elected President in 1868, and served two terms. He passed round the world in 1877-79, receiving the greatest honors ever shown to an American. He allowed his name to stand for nomination the third time, and was defeated in the Convention of 1880. He moved to New York, entered business, and was dragged down to ruin by the failure of the firm with which he was connected. Finding himself old, poor, and attacked by incurable cancer in the throat, he set himself to work to write a book which should tell the story of his life and shield his wife from want. He died before the book, his Personal Memoirs, was entirely finished, on July 23, 1885.]

It was reserved for Ulysses Grant in the last year of his life to amaze his friends by writing a book. Every one knew of his reticence, no one had thought of him as writer. He had never considered himself in any sense a literary man, but had held in high admiration men like Halleck and Scott, who had the power to express themselves in the elevated style which seemed to him good literature. Until dire necessity forced him to the task, he had never given a thought to the recording of his great deeds. Having made history, he left to others the task of writing it. And yet he had already written more than most literary men. In that long row of volumes, fat and portly, called The Official War Records, his mind, along certain lines of thought, had found the fullest expression. Literally hundreds of thousands of

words written by his own hand are there preserved. No one can study the enormous bulk of these despatches, letters, and orders without coming to a high admiration of the marvellous command which General Grant possessed over details of widely separated plans and campaigns. Nothing confused or hurried him. In fact, he spoke best as he thought best, when pushed hardest. One cannot fail to be impressed, also, by the nobility and lack of self-consciousness in all that he wrote. In this immense output, it is safe to say there is not one line discreditable to him.

After the war closed, his official career as President again demanded from him much writing of a certain sort. It could not be said, therefore, that he was without practice in the use of the pen. But in all this writing the idea of form was absent. He was occupied with the plain statement of fact, or of his opinions. Of the narrative form he had made little use, except in letters during the Mexican war.

When he set himself to write his memoirs, he began where he had laid down the pen after the war. He confined himself to the simple and forthright statement of the facts. He told again the story of his campaigns. His first paper was upon the disputed battle of Shiloh, concerning which he had never before made a complete report. He passed from this to a succinct and masterly statement of the siege of Vicksburg; and, having prepared himself for pure narrative, turned back to the story of his boyhood, his life in Mexico, and on the coast. In this order the great drama of his life unfolded itself naturally and easily under his pen.

The peculiarity of his mind was such that no phrase for effect, no extraneous adornment, was possible to him. He was, as a friend well said, "almost tediously truthful." It was his primary intention to express himself clearly and with as few words as possible. The workings of his mind were always direct and simple. Whatever the complications going on around him, no matter how acrid the disputes and controversies of subordinates, in the midst. of the confusing clash of opinions, charges, and counter-charges, Grant himself remained perfectly direct, calm, and single-minded. His mind digested every fact within reach, and cleared itself before he came to speech. He never used words to cover up

his thought, seldom to aid his thought, but only to express his . thought.

The circumstances under which the larger part of his story was written show clearly his will power and his manner of composition. For months he was unable to eat solid food, water felt like hot lead passing down his throat, and he was unable to sleep without anodynes. A malignant ulcer, incurable and insatiate, was eating its way into his throat at the base of the tongue. Speech became difficult, and at last impossible. During the time that he was still able to speak, he dictated much of the story. Wasted to pitiful thinness, and suffering ceaselessly, he was obliged to sit day and night in a low chair with his feet outthrust toward the fire. His mind was abnormally active, filled with the ceaseless revolving panorama of his epic deeds. At times he was forced to the use of morphia to cut off the intolerable movement of his thought. The sleeplessness which was a natural accompaniment of his disease was added to by the task which he had set himself to complete, but he did not allow himself to cut his work short on that account. Yet no trace of his suffering is to be found in the book.

He dictated slowly, but almost without hesitation, and his thought grouped itself naturally into paragraphs, and seemed to be almost perfectly arranged in word and phrase, ready to be drawn off like the precipitation of a chemical in a jar. In all this, he was precisely conforming to his life-long habit, which had been to speak only when he had something to say and had deliberated how to say it. As he grew weaker, the amount of his dictation slowly decreased, and at the last ceased altogether. His work was done.

The book surprised the world by its dignity, clarity, and simplicity of style. It displayed no attempt to be humorous, and yet became so, with rare effect, at times. Its author did not attempt to be picturesque, nor to magnify his importance on the battle-field. He was dispassionate. If he criticised his fellows, or his subordinates, he did so without anger and without envy. He rewrote many parts of his story in order that he should not do an injustice. He had no hatred of his enemies when he was commander in the field, and he had none when he wrote the story of his life.