The opening of Preface
Dean Swift describes the tomb as a place where savage enmity can rend the heart no more. Here, in the ominous shadow of the cypress, the faults and foibles of life are forgotten, and the imagination builds a shining pathway to the stars. Ascending this with rapid flight, the great dead is transfigured as he rises; the clouds close around him, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he is set afar on the heights with Miltiades and Alexander.
The tendency to the deification of men is strongest when a sudden eclipse falls athwart the disk of a great life at noontide. The pall of gloom sweeps swiftly across the landscape, and the beholder, feeling the chill of the darkness, mistakes it for the death of nature. So it was three hundred years ago when the silent Prince of Orange, the founder of Dutch independence, was smitten down in Delft. So it was when the peerless Lincoln fell. So it is when Garfield dies by the bullet of an assassin.