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 and flame, the fiery eloquence of Clay, the close grip of John Quincy Adams in argument, or the subtile felicity and gleam of primary perception which William Henry Seward brought for the enlivening of debate.
He never could have invented the New-Yorker's phrase of The Irrepressible Conflict as applied to the Free and Slave States, or the Illinoisian Abraham Lincoln's grander adaptation of Scripture,—A house divided against itself cannot stand: I do not expect the house to fall, but to cease to be divided.
Mr. Sumner quoted abundantly, but he is not for any rhetorical merits or ideal inventions in the whole range of his voluminous works quotable, however rich in his right to be cited for the spirit and design on every page.