blame. Pity he was so devoid of humor to recommend or soften his strokes!

His old peace doctrine, doubtless, mainly prompted his battle-flag resolution, while the time of offering it and his nearly contemporaneous break with his party seemed to betray an unfair and personal bias of which he was unaware.

Sensible of his great and long importance to the government, an egoistic, assuming, imperious, irascible inclination may to some have appeared to be disclosed; but he ingenuously felt he had a title to be consulted and that it was a slight and insult to set him aside. Let the administration that refused him as an instrument beware lest it become a hammer in the hands of inferior men, whose success will be suicide, and itself the tool! This may an inspiration from his coffin prevent! Massachusetts has honored herself at least as much as she did her son, and cast from yonder halls one ray of comfort on his seat in the Senate and on his death-bed in rescinding the censure on his course; for his memory is among her trophies,—no banner more so that hangs beneath the cupola above the marble floor,—and she is the inheritor of his renown; for if "Providence made Washington childless that the country might call him father," Sumner is without offspring that the State may be his mourner.

This freedom from all selfish heat or hate, one distinction of the statesman from the politician, is a trait too rare to pass without emphasis and applause.

An example, indeed, to the ordinary run of village contrivers, caucus packers, and municipal aspirants, of a man who never pulled a wire, rolled a log, laid a pipe, listened in a lobby, whispered in the ear what might not be proclaimed on the house-top, held a man by the button, or blew any trumpet but of the public good, however in his magnificent self-respect he might be falsely accused of wishing to blow only his own!

If a jealous personal honor ever had apology or excuse, it was how ample and entire in the case of a man—the only one in our annals—appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never applied to any other living creature.[A]

So he rose to bear the same unflinching testimony, no more groaning under the fire of reproach than of the burning cotton; and if proud of his position, with perfect consistency modest too.

I did not and at this distance of cooling time do not approve all the phraseology he employed on that senatorial occasion; but his weapons were words, and, however rough and affronting, for the right: those of his foes, equally gross and injurious, were for the wrong; and the assault of brutal force came to disturb the equation, in violation of all parliamentary privilege, with Douglas and his piratical compeers, with ill-disguised pleasure and half-pretended unconcern, looking on their own ignominy, crime, and shame, while the martyr that all but, yet not quite, expired, after years of suffering comes back, a resurrection witness not disposed of, and the assailant and would-be executioner dies long first, in Northern and Southern disgrace and his own remorse.

At the same height with Milton in his blindness, Sumner, with his torn and aching nerves, like a soldier who will not leave the field for loss of blood, resumed the conflict, struggling with disappointment and sorrow in age and loneliness, still moving ever immediately against all the powers of evil and works of the devil, his white plume, like that of the French Prince he quoted, floating ever