oth courage and
aptitude for military employment.

II

A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the
vortex of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have
lived and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his
musical studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano
keyboard. As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The
rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing
in Paris and London awakened within him the spirit of action rather than
of adventure.

There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too
accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he
never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims
he was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in
temperament and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.

He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country
and take on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into
the anti-slavery movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea
carried him quickly from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which
found him in the Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled
senses the creeping, crawling things beneath the surface; partyism
rampant, tyrannous and corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White
House; a Blaine, a Butler and a Garfield leading the Representatives,
a Cameron and a Conkling leading the Senate; single-minded
disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction, nowhere.

Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of
reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The
revenue service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were
packed with mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the
order of the day. Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure
and of blood had been poured out? Was it for this that he had fought
with tongue and pen and sword?

There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and
Fish, to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune,
the puissant Tribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in
Chicago--to give him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and
loosening things in Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could
not go on forever half the best elements in the State disfranchised.