The Monitor

We are often struck with the rapidity with which history is made now-a-days, more particularly in this country and among this people. Within the cycle of our own brief being, men have come and men have gone, like sunshine chasing the billows on the sea. Sometimes their coming and going has been like the flight of a flaming meteor, and again like the course of the glorious luminary of day their rising and setting has been in resplendent gold and softly chastened twilight.

A few years since in leisurely travelling a quiet river road in Penn's Neck township, this county, we were suddenly startled by the loud thunder of artillery as it thundered and echoed across the river from shore to shore. Making a bend of the road we were soon in full view of a river pageant, the like of which we never before witnessed and never, perhaps, will again. Off in mid-river were several stately ships, on which men were marching and counter-marching, a fine marine band discoursing splendid music, the colors the meanwhile being dipped and raised, and the men cheering vociferously. It was the sight of a lifetime, once seen never to be forgotten. And all for what? All as a send off on a trans Atlantic voyage to one who ten years previous was unknown to the country at large. The reader will understand, of course, that we refer to General Ulysses S. Grant. Will ever another Grant have such a history in this country?

In 1854 we stood in the Court House Square at Peoria, Ill., with other assembled thousands to listen to the stirring words of the renowned Stephen A. Douglas, the "Little Giant," and who now remembers Douglas.

When Abraham Lincoln reviewed the army of the Potomac in 1862, he was probably the best known man on the two Continents, and yet but a single decade previous he was scarcely known outside his own Congressional District.

Ten years ago Grover Cleveland was plain Mayor Cleveland of Buffalo, and to-day he stands as one of the foremost men in American politics. What fate the next whirl-a-gig in the wheel of fortune may bring to him none but the invisible knows.

And so they go, coming up out of the misty haze of an unknown past, enacting their little part on the stage of action and then, like actors at the close of a play, dropping the curtain after them. Where now the popular idols of only a few short years ago? Where McClellan, Garfield, Hancock, Sunset Cox, Chester A. Arthur, Henry Ward Beecher, Tilden, and scores of others now dead and their memory fast becoming oblivious? Where?