REST AND SHADE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 699, 29 August 1914, Page 3

REST AND SHADE.

THE LAST WORDS OF STONEWALL JACKSON. "'Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees." (These were the farewell words —of whom ? Of course poet sighing for the idlesse of Arcady, of some wornout spirit drooping for the cooling stream? No; they came from the lips of one who had never known or asked for repose or shade, whose crossings of rivers had hitherto been done in the face of blasts of hostile shells, from a stern, unresting man, not old, but under forty years, not exhausted, but in the full tide of gigantic enterprise, not peaceful, but the fiercest soldier of his age—one Stonewall Jackson dying by his. hurts on the field of Chancellorsville. They were his last words, closing a series of sharply uttered commands —"Order Hill to prepare for action !" "Pass the infantry to the front !" Then, '''very quietly and clearly," the beautiful, almost metrical sentence recorded; abovei and| straightway, says his fine historian, the late Colonel Henderson, "the soul of tba great Captain passed into the peace of God." s

Jackson had long been delirious from his terrible wounds—those rapid orders were, of course, nothing but "the last words of Marmion," the breath of a martial spirit hovering over the fighting-line, so long 'its home, before it took flight. But we have always been convinced that hia Cnal words welled from the clear spring of hite own unclouded mind. Often does Death, listening, "' doll cold-cared" legatee, for "his assured entail—often does he hear his own inheritance. That last faint whisker sometimes carries' the Parthian shot of his escaping enemy, v .he soul. , * * *' * * « The deep interest of Stonewall Jackson's dying words, however, lies not in their individual application, though that in his case is unexpected enough, but in their general. The passing warrior whispered not only his own but a universal yearning. For one instant of time all the pain land passion of the world, all its weakness, its inherent humrlrty,_ its beast-like sense of burden, found voice in those most unlikely lips, the thin soldier's lips still ruled rigid and straight, not by death, though within a tick of death, but by the utterance of order of battle. For all the world wants rest,, and shade, wants it more every day ; not only the old world, moreover, not only the scorched toiler umbering into the "labourer's sweet sleep," bnt the happy shepherd boy himself, shouting on the wold, has caught sight of that immortal sea which will' bear hdm hence, and; he, too, cries "'Thalassa !"—'''Linesman," in the '"Spectator."