I did not and at this distance of cooling time do not approve all the phraseology he employed on that senatorial occasion; but his weapons were words, and, however rough and affronting, 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 the Emancipation, which John Quincy Adams held justifiable as a war measure, and Lincoln proclaimed.
But though the greatness of rulers and social founders is in what they establish and bring to pass, yet in default of this rare achievement, which happens seldom in the course of ages to any man, a certain impracticability is in others in many exigencies a blessing to be thankful for, a virtue to applaud. In the collisions of interest with principle are plenty to trim, compromise, and compound as oligarchs or demagogues bid; but as the merit of some substances is the lack of ductility, so how oft we must lean on unmalleable men, whose back-bone is not supple as a universal joint, who will not "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning," and who, in a noble discontent with all yet undertaken or done, summon to worthier performance towards never-attained perfection in betterment of the common lot. Mr. Rubinstein was displeased with the preacher who said, "Men must be expected to do no more than they can." "No," said the artist, "that doctrine letting down the standard is worse than actual vice. We can forgive the last, not the first!" Men must do the impossible,—a word which Napoleon told his officer was beastly, never to be spoken, and in his dictionary not found. "With God all things are possible," and that means possible to whoever works with Him. Said the pianist to his pupils, "If you do not expect or intend to write finer music than Beethoven, you have no business to compose at all." Mr. Sumner aimed at the sun; and the feeling of philanthropic duty with which he stirred the body politic out of the custom of chronic oppression and old habit of wrong was of more precious consequence than carrying any particular scheme. With this earnestness, that would not stop short of improving the world, I was struck in my last conversation with him on the threatened Spanish war. If he did not interest or magnetize everybody, all individuals, like Crittenden or Clay, few cared more for their kind; and this broad benevolence, as well as special affection, lays hold on immortality. Who shall say such as Agassiz and Sumner are dead? "A great man has fallen," said my friend: no, a good man has risen.
Death brings simplicity and reality. As it approaches, learning and philosophy go; goodness and conscience are left, the last guests in the feast of life at the table of the heart. In Sumner the sentiment, foremost always, blooms at the pillow where last he laid, "so tired and weary," his head; and sentiment, as well as science, has eternal claim. He extends courtesy to callers, opens his eye while it could open, waves his hand while it had strength to move, says Sit down to his old associate, tries to speak when the lips no longer obey the will, and sends a legacy of love and reverence more precious than any gold to his old friend. Cold was he indeed?
For his noble affections, how we shall remember the solitary and little-related man, with no children, when he was sad, to play with in his house! His thirst for knowledge, his bent to investigate and study whatever had been said and done in the world, would have made him an antiquarian save for his patriotic and humanitarian zeal.
What a lover and knower he was of pictures, bronzes, manuscripts, old books, curious relics of the past, all memorials in all time of his fellow-men! Such research is a sort of humanity. Yet no man's sympathies were more in the present than his, or more eager to stretch after a perfected civilization in the future.
Indeed, the millennial day shone so upon him through the vista of hope as to dazzle and blind him, like Saul on the road to Damascus, to the immediate possibilities of action and direct bearings of his theme.
If there were any defect in his style, it was a certain lack of proportion, or an exceeding uniform stress, a straining forward against the leash of irrefragable circumstance, till in the ardor of pursuit the perspective of the subject was lost.
But whatever might be the lesser vices, the great virtues were in his judgment and thought.