Mr. Curtis, in an oration upon Charles Sumner, delivered shortly after the statesman’s death, said that “his look, his walk, his dress, his manner, were not those of the busy advocate, even in his younger years, but of the cultivated and brilliant man of society, the Admirable Crichton of the saloons.”
Mrs. Jefferson Davis, in her Life of her husband, spoke of Sumner as “a handsome, unpleasing man, and an athlete whose physique proclaimed his physical strength.” And Mr. Seward wrote to his wife in 1856: “Sumner is much changed for the worse. His elasticity and vigor are gone. He walks, and in every way moves, like a man who has not altogether recovered from a paralysis, or like a man whose sight is dimmed, and his limbs stiffened with age.”
At the autopsy it was discovered that the brain of Sumner showed no trace of the assault from the effects of which he suffered so terribly.
LOUIS AGASSIZ—From Life
LOUIS AGASSIZ—From Death