Excerpt from A Sketch of the Life of Randolph Fairfax: A Private in the Ranks of the Rockbridge Artillery, Attached to the "Stonewall Brigade," and Afterwards to the First Regiment Virginia Light Artillery, Second Corps Army of Northern Virginia; Including a Brief Account of Jackson's Celebrated Valley Campai

Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard' owes its world-wide popularity, not merelv to the elegance of the language and the musi cal flow of the verse, but chiefly to the fact that it is a true expres sion of the thoughts and feelings which such a scene naturally awakens in the human mind. Few could have painted the picture, but every enlightened person recognizes in it his own likeness. If such a subject as a single country churchyard inspired such a poem in an ungenial clime, what a grand elegy the poet would have written had he been born in our day in the sunny South, whose soil is cut up with sepulchres, and whose blue sky is the ceiling of a vast series of vaults, in which are entombed hosts of young cavaliers, who, had they been developed by time and culture, might have commanded the applause of listening senators or swayed the rod of empire. When Old men die it seems almost as natural, and awakens but little more emotion than when the evening sun goes down. When little infants in their early dawn close their soft eyes and breathe no more, we wonder what could have been the design of an all-wise Provi dence in bringing into the world so many young immortals just to look around them and to die. But when the maid in the bud of her beauty, and the young man in the bloom of his youth, standing in the midst of the landscape, and while hope is gladdening their vision with its enchanting perspectives, are suddenly cut down like the flower, these are the tombs that claim the tender tear and the elegiac song. But men in the ranks generally have no poet, and they die, not unwept, but unhonored and unsung.

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