ration. The science of the law, not its
practice, excited his enthusiasm. He turned instinctively from the
technicalities, the tergiversations, the gladiatorial display and
contention of the legal profession. To him they were but the ephemera of
the long summertide of jurisprudence. He thirsted for the permanent, the
ever living springs and principles of the law. Grotius and Pothier and
Mansfield and Blackstone and Marshall and Story were the shining heights
to which he aspired. He had neither the tastes nor the talents to emulate
the Erskines and the Choates of the Bar.

His vast readings in the field of history and literature contributed in
like manner toward his splendid outfit. So too his wide contact and
association with the leading spirits of the times in Europe and America.
All combined to teach him to know himself and the universal verities of
man and society, to distinguish the invisible and enduring substance of
life from its merely accidental and transient phases and phenomena.

He was an apt pupil and laid up in his heart the great lessons of the Book
of Truth. His visit to Europe served to complete his apprenticeship. It
was like Hercules going into the Nemean forest to cut himself a club. The
same grand object lesson he saw everywhere--man, human society, human
thoughts, human strivings, human wrong, human misery. Beneath differences
of language, governments, religion, race, color, he discerned the
underlying human principle and passion, which make all races kin, all men
brothers. In strange and distant lands he found the human heart with its
friendships, heroisms, beatitudes, the human intellect with its never
ending movement and progress. He found home, a common destiny wherever he
found common ideas and aspirations. And these he had but to look around to
behold. He felt himself a citizen of an immense over-nation, of a vast
world of federated hopes and interests.

When the plan for this visit had taken shape in his own mind, he consulted
his friends, Judge Story, Prof. Greenleaf, and President Quincy, who were
not at all well affected to it. The first two thought it would wean him
from his profession, the last one that Europe would spoil him, "send him
back with a mustache and a walking-stick." Ah! how little did they
comprehend him, how hard to understand that this young and indefatigable
scholar was only going abroad to cut himself a club for the Herculean
labors of his ripe manhood. He went, saw, an