qualities that won for him friends as true and devoted as man ever
possessed. Some have said he was hard and dictatorial. They had seen him
only when a high resolve had fired his breast, and when the gleam of
battle had lighted his countenance. His friends saw deeper, and knew
that beneath the exterior he assumed in his struggles with the world
there beat a heart as pure and unsullied, as confiding and as gentle, as
ever sanctified the domestic circle, or made loved ones happy. His heart
reminded me of a spring among the hills of the Susquehanna, to which I
often resorted in my youth; around a part of it we boys had built a
stone wall to protect it from outrage, while on the side next home we
left open a path, easily traveled by familiar feet, and leading straight
to the sweet and perennial waters within.

He lived to hear the salvos that announced, after more than two
centuries of bondage, the redemption of his native State. He lived to
vote for that grand act of enfranchisement that wiped from the
escutcheon of the nation the leprous stain of slavery, and to know that
the Constitution of the United States no longer recognized and protected
property in man. He lived to witness the triumph of his country in its
desperate struggle with treason, and to behold all its enemies, either
wanderers, like Cain, over the earth, or suppliants for mercy at her
feet. He lived to catch the first glimpse of the coming glory of that
new era of progress that matchless valor had won through the blood and
carnage of a thousand battle-fields. He lived, through all the storm of
war, to see, at last, America rejuvenated, rescued from the grasp of
despotism, and rise victorious, with her garments purified and her brow
radiant with the unsullied light of liberty. He lived to greet the
return of "meek-eyed peace," and then he gently laid his head upon her
bosom, and breathed out there his noble spirit.

The sword may rust in its scabbard, and so let it; but free men, with
free thought and free speech, will wage unceasing war until truth shall
be enthroned and sit empress of the world. Would to God that he had been
spared to complete a life of three score and ten years, for the sake of
his country and posterity. When I think of the good he would have
accomplished had he survived for twenty years, I can say, in the
language of Fisher Ames, "My heart, penetrated with the remembrance of
the man, grows liquid as I speak, and I could pour it out lik