betwixt the Gulf
of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

So it will be because not only a man, a citizen of the Commonwealth
and foremost trustee in the Congress of the country, but a cosmopolite
is dead, deserving that name as truly as any man who, since the
settlement of these colonies, has lived within their bounds.

What is the reason of the wide consequence of this event?

Not in the man's extraordinary original power.

Nature did not intend aught intellectually pre-eminent in his
constitution.

It had no organic strength to strike out new paths in action or
expression.

It fell into ways other agents had broken.

Mr. Sumner was not even an aboriginal abolitionist; he joined and did
yeoman's service in the antislavery ranks.

He startled the soldiers, twenty-nine years ago, in Boston, with his
extreme doctrine of peace; but he followed Ladd and others, with
copious illustration, but no new sentiment or novel idea.

Of origination there is no speck in his reflections or spark in his
style.

His mind is parasitical, his discourse full of precedents, quotations,
classic scenes, and historic allusions, sometimes savoring of
schoolboy recitations, sophomoric and declamatory, stilted and
grotesque. Yet he is in the list of wonderful men. Others thought and
he was led to fancy some resemblance in his feature and person to
Edmund Burke, which the portrait of Mr. Burke might actually suggest;
but this resemblance to the great English Commoner was but skin-deep,
with little hint of the deep sea line that fathomed every question, or
the impassioned imagination which cast the light of flame on every
measure, and kindled with magnetic sympathy, against the French
Revolution and for American privilege, now one and now another portion
of the British realm.

Mr. Sumner was perhaps a greater lover of freedom in its principle as
an inherent right and claim of all mankind than Mr. Burke; but Burke
had pre-eminent genius in politics, Sumner only accomplished talent,
though in the later light of a more humane era put to service in a
grander cause.

Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton, Burke, William Blake: such would
be our shining classification for poetry, philosophy, science,
politics, art, in the mother land.

But for native force we should think of many persons before Sumner in
his own field of study and pursuit.

He had not the majestic sweep of Webster, the weight or heat of that
mountain with its base of granite a