During the long, sultry days of that anxious summer, for many hours of the day and night, throughout all the land, wherever there was a newspaper or a telegraph office, about such places stood groups of people, measured in numbers by the degree of population, waiting and watching eagerly for the slips of paper which from time to time were posted in a conspicuous place on the front of the building. In the intervals they would gather in little knots and talk together in low tones. To one who did not know what had happened on July 2d, it would have been hard to guess what gathered these waiting crowds, day after day, throughout the land. With intense, foreboding suspense fifty millions of people were watching for the news from the bedside of the President of the United States, who had been stricken down by the bullet of the assassin. Who that lived through that long summer can forget those anxious days and nights? And when at last the brave struggle for life was ended, and the silent form was borne from the seaside to rest on the shores of Lake Erie, who can forget the solemn hush which seemed to prevail everywhere as the tomb opened to receive all that was mortal of the beloved President, James A. Garfield?
The President’s body was borne back to Washington, where it lay in state, viewed by great throngs of mourning people; then it was taken westward to Cleveland, and laid in the tomb by the shores of Lake Erie, almost in sight of his old home. The journey was one long funeral pageant. For almost the entire distance the railway tracks were lined with crowds of people, who, with uncovered heads, stood in reverent silence as the train passed. Not since the day when that other dead President, the great Lincoln, was borne to his last resting place, had such an assembly been gathered; and the love and grief which followed Garfield to his grave are the best tribute to the worth of his character.
Five months later, in the hall of the House of Representatives at Washington, amid such a throng as that chamber has seldom seen, Secretary Blaine delivered his eulogy of the dead President; and from that splendid and pathetic address we take the concluding words, which will fitly close this brief sketch:
“As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean’s changing wonders; on its fair sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
- Added degree sign ° to the presidents temperature where missing for consistency.
- Silently corrected typographical errors and also variations in spelling. One occurrence of an unpaiared double quotation mark could not be corrected with confidence.
- Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.