o eminently characteristic of Blaine, but
was withal one of the ablest men I have ever known. Gifted with
rare powers of oratory, with an apparently inexhaustible reservoir
of information at his command, he knew no superior in debate.
At one period of his life he was the recipient of public honors
without a parallel in our history. While yet a Representative in
Congress, he was a Senator-elect from Ohio, and the President-elect
of the United States. For once, it indeed seemed that "fortune
had come with both hands full." In the words of the Persian poet,
"he had obtained an ear of corn from every harvest." And yet, a
few months later, in the words of his great eulogist, "the stately
mansion of power had become to him the wearisome hospital of pain,
and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive,
stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness."

My personal acquaintance with Mr. Garfield began early in January,
1876, when we were members of the House Committee appointed by the
Speaker to convey the remains of a deceased member to his late
home, Norwich, Connecticut, for burial. Another member of the
Committee was Representative Wheeler of New York. It was late
Saturday afternoon when we were conveyed by carriages from the
crossing at Jersey City to the depot where the Norwich train was
in waiting. Our route lay for some distance along Broadway, through
the very heart of the great metropolis. As we passed the hurrying
throngs that crowded the great thoroughfare that sombre winter
evening, Mr. Garfield remarked that it was a scene similar to
the one we were then witnessing that suggested to Mr. Bryant one
of the most stirring of his shorter poems.

At our request and in tones that linger even yet in my memory,
he then repeated these lines:

"Let me move slowly through the street
Filled with an ever shifting train,
Amid the sound of steps that beat
The murmuring walks like autumn rain.

How fast the flitting figures come,
The mild, the fierce, the stony face;
Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some
Where secret tears have left their trace!

They pass to toil, to strife, to rest,
To halls in which the feast is spread,
To chambers where the funeral guest
In silence sits beside the dead.

Each where his tasks or pleasures call
They pass, and heed each other not.
There is Who heeds, Who holds them all
In His large love, and boundless tho