"He lived with Nature and learned of her. He toiled, but his toil
was never hopeless and degrading. His feet were upon the earth
but the stars shining in perennial beauty were ever above him to
inspire contemplation. He heard the song of the thrush, and the
carol of the lark. He watched the sun in its course. He knew the
dim paths of the forest, and his soul was awed by the power of the
storm."

The closing sentences of Senator Ingalls's tribute to a departed
colleague were sombre indeed:

"In the democracy of Death all men are equal. There is neither
rank, nor station, nor prerogative, in the republic of the grave.
At that fatal threshold the philosopher ceases to be wise, and the
song of the poet is silent. There Dives relinquished his riches
and Lazarus his rags; the creditor loses his usury, and the debtor
is acquitted of his obligation; the proud man surrenders his dignity,
the politician his honors, the worldling his pleasures. Here
the invalid needs no physician, and the laborer rests from unrequited
toil. Here at last is Nature's final decree of equity. The wrongs
of time are redressed, and injustice is expiated. The unequal
distribution of wealth and honor, capacity, pleasure, and opportunity,
which makes life so cruel and inexplicable a tragedy, ceases in
the realms of Death. The strongest has there no supremacy, and
the weakest needs no defence. The mightiest captain succumbs to
the invincible adversary who disarms alike the victor and the
vanquished."

In his day Edward Everett was the most gifted of American orators.
His style, however, to readers in "these piping times of peace,"
seems a trifle stilted. What orator of the twentieth century would
attempt such a sentence as the following from Everett's celebrated
eulogy upon Washington:

"Let us make a national festival and holiday of his birthday;
and ever, as the twenty-second of February returns, let us remember
that, while with these solemn and joyous rites of observance we
celebrate the great anniversary, our fellow-citizens on the Hudson,
on the Potomac, from the Southern plains to the Western lakes, are
engaged in the same offices of gratitude and love. Nor we, nor
they alone; beyond the Ohio, beyond the Mississippi, along that
stupendous trail of immigration from the East to the West,
which, bursting into States as it moves westward, is already
threading the Western prairies, swarming through the portals of
the Rocky Mountains