ing, for the right: those of
his foes, equally gross and injurious, were for the wrong; and the
assault of brutal force came to disturb the equation, in violation of
all parliamentary privilege, with Douglas and his piratical compeers,
with ill-disguised pleasure and half-pretended unconcern, looking on
their own ignominy, crime, and shame, while the martyr that all but,
yet not quite, expired, after years of suffering comes back, a
resurrection witness not disposed of, and the assailant and would-be
executioner dies long first, in Northern and Southern disgrace and his
own remorse.

At the same height with Milton in his blindness, Sumner, with his torn
and aching nerves, like a soldier who will not leave the field for
loss of blood, resumed the conflict, struggling with disappointment
and sorrow in age and loneliness, still moving ever immediately
against all the powers of evil and works of the devil, his white
plume, like that of the French Prince he quoted, floating ever 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 th