To the parent who was the confidant of his most intimate
thoughts he said: "All that I wish for myself is that I may at all times
be ready and firm to meet that fate we cannot shun, and to die
gracefully and properly when the hour comes." Never was wish more
signally fulfilled. Again he tells her: "My utmost desire and ambition
is to look steadily upon danger;" and his desire was accomplished. His
intrepidity was complete. No form of death had power to daunt him. Once
and again, when bound on some deadly enterprise of war, he calmly counts
the chances whether or not he can compel his feeble body to bear him on
till the work is done. A frame so delicately strung could not have been
insensible to danger; but forgetfulness of self, and the absorption of
every faculty in the object before him, shut out the sense of fear. He
seems always to have been at his best in the thick of battle; most
complete in his mastery over himself and over others.
But it is in the intimacies of domestic life that one sees him most
closely, and especially in his letters to his mother, from whom he
inherited his frail constitution, without the beauty that distinguished
her. "The greatest happiness that I wish for here is to see you happy."
"If you stay much at home I will come and shut myself up with you for
three weeks or a month, and play at piquet from morning till night; and
you shall laugh at my short red hair as much as you please.
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