ahead to follow; like ex-President, Representative Adams, in his armor to the very edge and last of earth, like Buckle, talking in his agony of his book, and commending to survivors in Congress his beloved Civil Rights' Bill, dealing out well-directed blows for his race of every color and tribe till the instant the final stroke came to cut body and spirit apart. Truly, the halo of angelic glory hangs not only around the heads of dead saints! Such a man might be tempted to claim the honor of his fellow-men, and a lofty self-esteem and aspiration to the highest dignities hardly misbecame him, who, like Cato, was wrapped in conscious integrity, and established in the respect of all praiseworthy persons such a place. After the famous eulogy in his Phi Beta Kappa oration, of Pickering, Story, Allston, and Channing, the toast of John Quincy Adams was: "The memory of the scholar, jurist, artist, and divine,—and not the memory, but the long life of the kindred genius that has embalmed them all." Yet it has come for him also to a memory, and a noble one now.

As a humble cotemporary I copy not others' impressions, but simply set down my own. Among his associates, the fault commonly found with Sumner is not that he was implacable—none easier to propitiate—but impracticable; not an idealist, but ideologist and doctrinary dreamer of a peace and freedom on earth which he put into no effective and satisfactory form; for ten thousand besides him recommended the Emancipation, which John Quincy Adams held justifiable as a war measure, and Lincoln proclaimed.

But though the greatness of rulers and social founders is in what they establish and bring to pass, yet in default of this rare achievement, which happens seldom in the course of ages to any man, a certain impracticability is in others in many exigencies a blessing to be thankful for, a virtue to applaud. In the collisions of interest with principle are plenty to trim, compromise, and compound as oligarchs or demagogues bid; but as the merit of some substances is the lack of ductility, so how oft we must lean on unmalleable men, whose back-bone is not supple as a universal joint, who will not "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning," and who, in a noble discontent with all yet undertaken or done, summon to worthier performance towards never-attained perfection in betterment of the common lot. Mr. Rubinstein was displeased with the preacher who said, "Men must be expected to do no more than they can." "No," said the artist, "that doctrine letting down the standard is worse than actual vice. We can forgive the last, not the first!" Men must do the impossible,—a word which Napoleon told his officer was beastly, never to be spoken, and in his dictionary not found. "With God all things are possible," and that means possible to whoever works with Him. Said the pianist to his pupils, "If you do not expect or intend to write finer music than Beethoven, you have no business to compose at all." Mr. Sumner aimed at the sun; and the feeling of philanthropic duty with which he stirred the body politic out of the custom of chronic oppression and old habit of wrong was of more precious consequence than carrying any particular scheme. With this earnestness, that would not stop short of improving the world, I was struck in my last conversation with him on the threatened Spanish war. If he did not interest or magnetize everybody, all individuals, like Crittenden or Clay, few cared more for their kind; and this broad benevolence, as well as special affection, lays hold on immortality. Who shall say such as Agassiz and Sumner are dead? "A great man has fallen," said my friend: no, a good man has risen.

Death brings simplicity and reality. As it approaches, learning and philosophy go; goodness and conscience are left, the last guests in the feast of