[Footnote]
* Richard H. Dana, the elder.
[End of Footnote]
He was spared the fate of so many of our great New England statesmen, that of closing his life in sorrow and in gloom. His last days were days of hope, not of despair. Sumner came to his seat in the Senate Chamber as to a solitude. When he was struck with death there was found upon his table a volume of Shakespeare with this passage, probably the last printed text on which his eyes ever gazed, marked with his own hand:
Would I were dead! if God's good will were so;
For what is in this world, but care and woe?
The last days of Samuel Adams were embittered by poverty, sickness, and the death of his only son.
Daniel Webster laid wearily down his august head in disappointment and sorrow, predicting with dying breath that the end had come to the great party to whose service his life was given.
When John Quincy Adams fell at his post in the House of Representatives a great newspaper declared that there could not be found in the country another bold enough or bad enough to take his place.
But Mr. Morrill's last days were filled with hope and not with despair. To him life was sweet and immortality assured. His soul took its flight
On wings that fear no glance of God's pure sight,
No tempest from his breath.
And so we leave him. His life went out with the century of which he saw almost the beginning. What the future may have in store for us we cannot tell. But we offer this man as an example of an American Senator and American citizen than which, so far, we have none better. Surely that life has been fortunate. He is buried where he was born. His honored grave is hard by the spot where his cradle was rocked. He sleeps where he wished to sleep, in the bosom of his beloved Vermont. No State ever mourned a nobler son; no son was ever mourned by a nobler State. He enjoyed to a ripe old age everything that can make life happy—honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
The love of friends without a single foe,
Unequalled lot below.