He dwelt with the tribes of the marsh and moor,He sate at the board of kings;He tasted the toil of the burdened slaveAnd the joy that triumph brings.But whether to jungle or palace hallOr white-walled tent he came,He was brother to king and soldier and slaveHis welcome was the same.
He dwelt with the tribes of the marsh and moor,He sate at the board of kings;He tasted the toil of the burdened slaveAnd the joy that triumph brings.But whether to jungle or palace hallOr white-walled tent he came,He was brother to king and soldier and slaveHis welcome was the same.
He was very human and intensely American, and this knit a bond between him and the Americanpeople which nothing could ever break. And then he had yet one more attraction, not so impressive, perhaps, as the others, but none the less very important and very captivating. He never by any chance bored the American people. They might laugh at him or laugh with him, they might like what he said or dislike it, they might agree with him or disagree with him, but they were never wearied of him, and he never failed to interest them. He was never heavy, laborious, or dull. If he had made any effort to be always interesting and entertaining he would have failed and been tiresome. He was unfailingly attractive, because he was always perfectly natural and his own unconscious self. And so all these things combined to give him his hold upon the American people, not only upon their minds, but upon their hearts and their instincts, which nothing could ever weaken, and which made him one of the most remarkable, as he was one of the strongest, characters that the history of popular government can show. He was also—and this is very revealing and explanatory, too, of his vast popularity—a man of ideals. He did not expose them daily on the roadside with language fluttering about them like the Thibetan who ties his slip of paper to the prayer wheel whirling in the wind. He kept his ideals to himself until the hour of fulfillment arrived. Some of them were the dreams of boyhood, from which he never departed, and which I have seen him carry out shyly and yet thoroughly and with intense personal satisfaction.
He had a touch of the knight errant in his daily life, although he would never have admitted it; but it was there. It was not visible in the medieval form of shining armor and dazzling tournaments, but in the never-ceasing effort to help the poor and the oppressed, to defend and protect women and children, to right the wronged and succor the downtrodden Passing by on the other side was not a mode of travel through life ever possible to him; and yet he was as far distant from the professional philanthropist as could well be imagined, for all he tried to do to help his fellow men he regarded as part of the day’s work to be done and not talked about. No man ever prized sentiment or hated sentimentality more than he. He preached unceasingly the familiar morals which lie at the bottom of both family and public life. The blood of some ancestral Scotch covenanter or of some Dutch reformed preacher facing the tyranny of Philip of Spain was in his veins, and with his large opportunities and his vast audiences he was always ready to appeal for justice and righteousness. But his own personal ideals he never attempted to thrust upon the world until the day came when they were to be translated into realities of action.
When the future historian traces Theodore Roosevelt’s extraordinary career he will find these embodied ideals planted like milestones along the road over which he marched. They never left him. His ideal of public service was to be found in his life, and as his life drew to its close he had to meethis ideal of sacrifice face to face. All his sons went from him to the war, and one was killed upon the field of honor. Of all the ideals that lift men up, the hardest to fulfill is the ideal of sacrifice. Theodore Roosevelt met it as he had all others and fulfilled it to the last jot of its terrible demands. His country asked the sacrifice and he gave it with solemn pride and uncomplaining lips.
This is not the place to speak of his private life, but within that sacred circle no man was ever more blessed in the utter devotion of a noble wife and the passionate love of his children. The absolute purity and beauty of his family life tell us why the pride and interest which his fellow countrymen felt in him were always touched with the warm light of love. In the home so dear to him, in his sleep, death came, and—
So Valiant-for-Truth passed over and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
McGrath-Sherrill Press, Boston
Transcriber's Note
Cover modified from an image obtained from The Internet Archive and placed in the Public Domain.