more than two thousand years ago, was pointed out to succeeding ages by the lofty mound, around which many a tourist has since lingered, and which, to this day, marks the spot where the Athenian heroes fell.
mingling with the motives that suggested them. Sometimes it was fear that prompted the timid thus to propitiate the wrath of the powerful; sometimes it was a servile adulation that, in the time-serving, sought by such means to secure a recompense in the shape of other honors or emoluments to be reciprocated.
But let us pass from this melancholy retrospect to the more agreeable contemplation of the tribute due to the valiant dead that lie here now at rest around us. The posthumous honors rendered to departed patriots are commended to us by the example of the noblest nations of antiquity, and are prompted by those impulses of the human heart which in all ages seek to perpetuate some record or reminiscence of the good and the brave.
The bridge has been known in the neighborhood ever since the battle as the Burnside Bridge, which name, for its pastoral as well as patriotic significance, it will probably retain forever.
Thus ended only, for want of light to pursue it further, a battle that had raged for nearly fourteen hours, and which beyond doubt was the fiercest and bloodiest of the war.
Twelve thousand of our dead and wounded warriors, and at least as many more of the enemy lay stretched upon the field.
wing, turned again for a time the fortunes of the day, and once more drove back our tottering line over that hard fought field.
Two other of our division commanders had been now lost to us—the lamented Richardson and the heroic General Sedgwick, the former falling mortally wounded, and the latter, though wounded several times, still struggling to keep the field. To and fro the contest had now swayed for seven hours; it was afternoon, and the combatants stood, as it were, at bay, each appearing confident of their power to defend, but doubtful of their ability to assail.
The battle of the 17th opened at the dawn of day on the spot where the skirmish of the previous evening had closed; each side seemed to have looked to this point as the one to be particularly strengthened, and as though anticipating the tremendous struggle of which it was to be the centre.
check him at that mountain pass. Reaching its crest in advance of the Union army, it is easy to perceive how even a smaller force than these two leaders then commanded, could, with the advantage which their position secured, hold in check for a time our advancing column struggling up its eastern slope, but our men, though sure to encounter a murderous fire from the ridges around them, were not to be long arrested in their progress.
throb the quicker as it remembers the change from the dogged, moody, scowling, and stifled condition in which the presence of the Confederates had for four days kept that people tortured, to the outburst of joyous, enthusiastic, exuberant and irrepressible loyalty that rung out from cellar to house-top as the boys in blue pressed on upon their rear ?
something startling in the ideas it suggested. No one who was subject to the process had ever witnessed its operation, the country had only a kind of traditional knowledge of the character of the proceeding, all the more exciting for its very vagueness.
approach, we may imagine to-day, though even now can scarcely appreciate the responsibilities of the Union commander, and understand some of the reasons for what, in the nervous anxiety of that moment, might have been considered by some as too tardy a pursuit. He was, however, on the right track ; the van of his army reached Frederick on the 12th of September, Lee, with the greater part of his command, having left it two days before.