singleness of purpose and directness of aim. He went straight to his mark. His public life was devoted to one object, which absorbed his whole soul; that was to make righteousness and freedom controlling forces in the government of the country. He had no other ambition. He desired public office only as he could make it an instrument to that end. He cared for history only as its lessons were lessons of justice and freedom. He cared for literature only as he could draw from it persuasion, argument, or illustration which would advance that lofty purpose. He cared for art only when it taught a moral lesson.

He had a marvellous capacity for work. From the beginning to the end, his life was a life of incessant labor. He had no idle moments. Even conversation, in which he delighted, was an intellectual exercise. In college, the lonely light shone out from his study window, where he

"outwatched the Bear"

long after the gayest of youthful revellers had gone to bed. Even in the heat of summer, in Washington, his life was crowded with hard work. I have known him more than once to fix the hour of midnight for a meeting with delegations with whom he could find no time in the busy day.

The results of this incessant toil were retained in a memory from which nothing seemed to escape. As it was impossible for him to be idle, so it seemed impossible for him to forget. His mind was an encyclopædia of the literature and history of constitutional liberty.

He had an indomitable courage. He never flinched or hesitated. He was never troubled with doubts. He saw everything clearly, and could never understand the state of mind of a man who could not see things as he did.

His was the most hopeful nature it was ever my fortune to know. The great virtue of hope, the central figure in the mighty group which the apostle tells us are forever to abide, possessed the very depths of his soul. He came into public life when slavery controlled every department of the government; legislated through Congress; administered the law through the Executive; sat on the bench of the Supreme Court. The first years of his public service were years of signal victories of the slaveholding power. To common men the day seemed constantly growing darker and darker, and the cause of freedom more and more hopeless. Sumner never abated one jot or tittle of his sublime confidence. The close of some of his speeches in those days is a trumpet note of triumph.

When he was stricken down in the Senate-chamber by the bludgeon of an assassin, his first conscious utterance as he recovered from the stupor caused by the terrible blows upon his head was that he would renew the conflict with slavery in the Senate as soon as he could return there. In his first public speech, a few weeks afterward, he said: "You have already made allusion to the suffering which I have undergone. This is not small, but it has been incurred in the performance of duty; and how small is it compared with that tale of woe which is perpetually coming to us from the house of bondage! With you I hail the omens of final triumph. I ask no prophet to confirm this assurance. The future is not less secure than the past."

He prefixed to his own edition of his works the motto from Leibnitz:—

But there was no "fortasse" about it, to his confident and triumphant faith.

He had a gentle, affectionate, and magnanimous nature, incapable of hatred or revenge. In spite of his severity of speech, his differences with men were differences of principle, never personal. There is no nobler sentence in political history than that with which he begins his first speech after his injury, when he got back from Europe and took his place again in the Senate:—

"Mr. President: Undertaking now, after a silence of more than four years, to address the Senate on this important subject, I should suppress the emotions natural to such an occasion, if I did not declare on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being through whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for the cause so near my heart. To the honored commonwealth whose representative I am, and also to my immediate associates in this body, with whom I enjoy the fellowship which is found in thinking alike concerning the Republic, I owe thanks, which I seize the moment to express, for indulgence extended to me throughout the protracted seclusion enjoined on me by medical skill; and I trust it will not be thought unbecoming in me to put on record here, as an apology for leaving my seat so long vacant, without making way, by resignation, for a successor, that I acted under the illusion of an invalid, whose hopes for restoration to natural health continued against oft recurring disappointment.

"When last I entered into this debate, it became my duty to expose the crime against Kansas, and to insist upon the immediate admission of that territory as a state of this Union, with a constitution forbidding slavery. Time has passed, but the question remains. Resuming the discussion precisely where I left it, I am happy to avow that rule of moderation which, it is said, may venture to fix the boundaries of wisdom itself. I have no personal griefs to utter; only a vulgar egotism could intrude such into this chamber. I have no personal wrongs to avenge; only a brutish nature could attempt to wield that vengeance which belongs to the Lord. The years that have intervened and the tombs that have opened since I spoke[1] have their voices, too, which I cannot fail to hear. Besides, what am I, what is any man among the living or among the dead, compared with the question before us? It is this alone which I shall discuss, and I begin the argument with that easy victory which is found in charity."

He was proud that he was an American, proud of his State, proud of his birthplace, proud of his office. To his mind the most exalted position on earth was the position of a Senator of the United States. And if he thought that to be a Massachusetts Senator was a prouder title still, who shall blame him? From the beginning he had Massachusetts behind him; when he spoke from his seat, it was the voice, not of a man, but of a commonwealth.

It seemed sometimes as if he thought everything that had been accomplished for freedom was accomplished in the Senate; that even the war was but a tumult which had disturbed the debates, somewhat. He kept his senatorial robe unstained. He seemed never to lay it aside. There was no place in his life for jesting or trifling. He had no sense of humor. The pledge which he took upon his lips when he entered upon his great office he kept religiously to the end. "To vindicate freedom and oppose slavery is the object near my heart. Others may become indifferent to these principles, bartering them for political success, vain and short-lived, or forgetting the visions of youth in the dreams of age. Whenever I forget them, whenever I become indifferent to them, whenever I cease to be constant in maintaining them through good report and evil report, then may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, may my right hand forget its cunning."

His political creed, his political Bible, his Ten Commandments, his Golden Rule, were the