298 EULOGY ON THE LATE GENERAL JOSEPH G. TOTTEN. 



ferings of his sickness with cheerfulness and resignation, and retained to the 

 last the perfect use of all his mental faculties. He had long been a member 

 and communicant of the Episcopal church, and died in the Christian's hope of 

 a joyful resurrection. 



Gentle, kind, and good, mild, modest, and tolerant, wise, sagacious, shrewd, 

 and learned, jet simple and unpretending as a child, he died as he had lived, 

 surrounded by hearts gushing with affection, and the object of the respect and 

 love of all with whom he had ever been associated. 



The greatest of sculptors, the greatest of painters, a man unsurpassed in 

 boldness and originality of thought, and whose name is among those of the few 

 who^e genius overpasses the lim.ts of country and claims homage from all man- 

 kind — Michael Angelo — in a work stamped with the maturity of his powers, 

 carved a figure known to the world as " 11 Pensiero," or Thought. There ex- 

 ists in art no other personification of meditation, no other type of self-collected- 

 ness and profound thought. 



The sculptor arrayed it not as a philosopher, as a monk, as a poet, as an 

 artist, as a theologian, as a scholar, nor even as a pope. And yet these differ- 

 ent types of thinkers were not wanting in the past or present of the age and 

 country of a Raphael, of a Correggio, of a Leonardo da Vinci, of a Dante, of a 

 Savonarola, of a Marco Polo, of a Columbus, of a Machiavelli, of a Galileo, of a 

 St. Francis de Assis, of a St. Thomas Aquinas, of a Julius II, of a Leo X, 

 and of a Clement VII. 



How, then, has Michael Angelo arrayed his personified " Thought ?" In the 

 garb of a Soldier, upon the breast the cuirass, upon the brow, wrapt in medita- 

 tion, the iron casque of the man of war. The great sculptor has divined the 

 mysterious cause why, among all people, among all classes, and in all epochs, 

 the soldier is honored. Instinct teaches the people, and genius taught Michael 

 Angelo, that among so many glorious examples, among so many immortal vic- 

 tims, so many illustrious martyrs or devotees of thought, illustrating an age or 

 a country, the soldier stands forth pre-eminently, in all ages and in all countries, 

 the victim always ready, the defender always armed, the servant, the apostle, 

 and the martyr. 



It is the Christian version of the ancient allegory which made Minerva issue 

 from the brain of Jupiter : Minerva, or wisdom armed, the heimet upon her 

 brow, the sword in her hand. 



Will the foregoing paragraphs, which I have translated somewhat freely from 

 the " Soldat " of Joachim Ambert, a work devoted to the illustration of the sol- 

 dier's career, be deemed an immodest or extravagant glorification of the profes- 

 sion of arms 1 Far be it from me to exalt unduly that profession, but I would 

 at least make a claim for it, the more necessary since popular apprehension tends 

 to lose sight of the thinker in the man of force and of blood, that, more than any 

 other, it embraces all sciences and all branches of human knowledge, and leads 

 its followers into vast and diverse fields of thought. Let the illustrious dead be 

 our witnesses ; that idea which a genius of a Michael Angelo inspired and em- 

 bodied in marble ; that idea which the lives of a Coosar, a Frederick, a Washing- 

 ton, a Napoleon, and a Wellington have justified ; the union of Force and 

 Thought finds yet another and a varied illustration in the accomplished soldier 

 and profound thinker whose life and works we now commemorate. 



RESOLUTIONS OF THE LIGHT-HOUSE BOARD. 



Resolved, That the members of the Light-house Board feel most deeply the 

 loss sustained by the branch of the public service under their charge in the 

 death of Brevet Major General Joseph Gilbert Totten, who has been one of the 

 most useful and active members of the board from its first appointment in pur- 



