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قراءة كتاب Senatorial Character A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, After the Decease of Charles Sumner.

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Senatorial Character
A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, After the Decease of Charles Sumner.

Senatorial Character A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, After the Decease of Charles Sumner.

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 6

life at the table of the heart. In Sumner the sentiment, foremost always, blooms at the pillow where last he laid, "so tired and weary," his head; and sentiment, as well as science, has eternal claim. He extends courtesy to callers, opens his eye while it could open, waves his hand while it had strength to move, says Sit down to his old associate, tries to speak when the lips no longer obey the will, and sends a legacy of love and reverence more precious than any gold to his old friend. Cold was he indeed?

For his noble affections, how we shall remember the solitary and little-related man, with no children, when he was sad, to play with in his house! His thirst for knowledge, his bent to investigate and study whatever had been said and done in the world, would have made him an antiquarian save for his patriotic and humanitarian zeal.

What a lover and knower he was of pictures, bronzes, manuscripts, old books, curious relics of the past, all memorials in all time of his fellow-men! Such research is a sort of humanity. Yet no man's sympathies were more in the present than his, or more eager to stretch after a perfected civilization in the future.

Indeed, the millennial day shone so upon him through the vista of hope as to dazzle and blind him, like Saul on the road to Damascus, to the immediate possibilities of action and direct bearings of his theme.

If there were any defect in his style, it was a certain lack of proportion, or an exceeding uniform stress, a straining forward against the leash of irrefragable circumstance, till in the ardor of pursuit the perspective of the subject was lost.

But whatever might be the lesser vices, the great virtues were in his judgment and thought.

He was an admirable inciter. How we needed incentives! He hallooed to a grander chase than any huntsman's. He was the Lamartine of America, our orator of the human race. The Senate floor was to him a popular rostrum and sacred stump. He advocated every great cause if he found the key of none.

He roused England and the United States, kindling into white heat, like dry wood, after such long seasoning, the Alabama difficulties, and compelling an attention which doubtless was good for both parties, although his extravagant statement of the doctrine of consequential damages could not settle the question, and failed of the seal and sanction of international law. More human than divine, his inspiration came from without rather than from within. The first time I saw him, forty years ago, with the same characteristic ornate and fervent language, and garnish of Latin references, he elucidated to me the difference between a pettifogger or litigious searcher for cases—a præco actionum as he called him—and a jurist of the Judge Story stamp.

Already he saw in faith the career for which he turned aside from every flattering offer that would divert him, conscious of superior ability to serve at the highest posts to which Democrat joined hands with Free Soiler to lead. Strange that the seemingly accidental, shall I say insincere, vote of a coalition should have furnished the most distinguished and perhaps longest continued Senator of the land!

His empty chair on the Senate floor, drew, last week, at the obsequies, the spectators' eyes.

But it was unoccupied that he might fill a higher seat prepared, waiting for, and needing, not the undying part but the everlasting whole; for we are not whole till we drop our dust! Three funeral-sensations, I remember,—of Webster, the man of power, Lincoln, the man of providence, and Sumner, as I delight to call him, the man of purity.

If the shadow of no demise ever brooded over this region as a huge pall, a black sheet let down from the sky, like that of the great New-Englander; and if no public sorrow in our day and generation was

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