"Such as raised
To height of noblest temper heroes old,
Arming to battle, and instead of rage
Deliberate valor breathed, firm and unmoved
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat;
Nor wanting power to mitigate and suage
With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds."
When General Garfield took the oath of office as President, he seemed to those who knew him best, though in his fiftieth year, still in the prime of a splendid and vigorous youth. He was still growing. We hoped for him eight years of brilliant administration, and then, in some form or place of service, an old age like that of Adams, whom, in variety of equipment, alone of our Presidents he resembled. What was best and purest and loftiest in the aspiration of America seemed at last to have laid its hand on the helm. Under its beneficent rule we hoped, as our country entered on its new career of peace and prosperity, a nobler liberty, a better friendship, a purer justice, a more lasting brotherhood. But he was called to a sublimer destiny. He had ascended along and up the heights of service, of success, of greatness, of glory; ever raised by the people to higher ranks for gallant and meritorious conduct on each field, until by their suffrages he stood foremost among men of the foremost among nations. But in the days of his sickness and death he became the perpetual witness and example how much greater than the achievements of legislative halls, or the deeds of the field of battle, are the household virtues and simple family affections which all men have within their reach; how much greater than the lessons of the college or the camp, or the congress, are the lessons learned at mother's knees. The honors paid to Garfield are the protest of a better age and a better generation against the vulgar heroisms of the past. Go through their mausoleums and under their triumphal arches, and see how the names inscribed there shrink and shrivel compared with that of this Christian soldier, whose chiefest virtues, after all, are of the fireside and the family circle, and of the dying bed. Here the hero of America becomes the hero of humanity.
We are justified, then, in saying of this man that he has been tried and tested in every mode by which the quality of a human heart and the capacity of a human intellect can be disclosed; by adversity, by prosperity, by poverty, by wealth, by leadership in deliberative assemblies, and in the perilous edge of battle, by the height of power and of fame. The essay was to be completed by the certain and visible approach of death. As he comes out into the sunlight, more and more clearly does his country behold a greatness and symmetry which she is to see in their true and full proportions only when he lies in the repose of death.
"As sometimes in a dead man's face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness, hardly seen before,
Comes out, to some one of his race,
So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,
I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old."
Let us not boast at the funeral of our dead. Such a temper would be doubly odious in the presence of such expressions of hearty sympathy from governments of every form. But we should be unfaithful to ourselves if in asking for this man a place in the world's gallery of illustrious names we did not declare that we offer him as an example of the products of Freedom. With steady and even step he walked from the log-cabin and the canal-path to the school, to the college, to the battle-field, to the halls of legislation, to the White House, to the chamber of death. The ear in which the voices of his countrymen, hailing him at the pinnacle of human glory had scarcely died out, heard the voice of the dread archangel, and his countenance did not change. Is not that country worth dying for whose peasantry are of such a strain? Is not the Constitution worth standing by under whose forms Freedom calls such men to her high places? Is not the Union worth saving which gives all of us the property of countrymen in such a fame?
IV.
HON. JAMES G. BLAINE'S EULOGY.
Mr. President: For the second time in this generation the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first born. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. "Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited where such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character."