Mr. CLEMENS.—Mr. President: I should not have thought it necessary to add any thing to what has already been said, but for a request preferred by some of the friends of the deceased. I should have been content to mourn him in silence, and left it to other tongues to pronounce his eulogy. What I have now to say shall be brief—very brief.
Mr. President, it is now less than three short years ago since I first entered this body. At that period it numbered among its members many of the most illustrious statesmen this republic has ever produced, or the world has ever known. Of the living, it is not my purpose to speak; but in that brief period, death has been busy here; and, as if to mark the feebleness of human things, his arrows have been aimed at the highest, the mightiest of us all. First, died Calhoun. And well, sir, do I remember the deep feeling evinced on that occasion by him whose death has been announced here to-day, when he said: “I was his senior in years—nothing else. In the course of nature I ought to have preceded him. It has been decreed otherwise; but I know that I shall linger here only a short time, and shall soon follow him.” It was genius mourning over his younger brother, and too surely predicting his own approaching end.
He, too, is now gone from among us, and left none like him behind. That voice, whose every tone was music, is hushed and still. That clear, bright eye is dim and lustreless, and that breast, where grew and flourished every quality which could adorn and dignify our nature, is cold as the clod that soon must cover it. A few hours have wrought a mighty change—a change for which a lingering illness had, indeed, in some degree, prepared us; but which, nevertheless, will still fall upon the nation with crushing force. Many a sorrowing heart is now asking, as I did yesterday, when I heard the first sound of the funeral bell—
“And is he gone?—the pure of the purest,
The hand that upheld our bright banner the surest,
Is he gone from our struggles away?
But yesterday lending a people new life,
Cold, mute, in the coffin to-day.”
Mr. President, this is an occasion when eulogy must fail to perform its office. The long life which is now ended is a history of glorious deeds too mighty for the tongue of praise. It is in the hearts of his countrymen that his best epitaph must be written. It is in the admiration of a world that his renown must be recorded. In that deep love of country which distinguished every period of his life, he may not have been unrivalled. In loftiness of intellect, he was not without his peers. The skill with which he touched every chord of the human heart may have been equalled. The iron will, the unbending firmness, the fearless courage, which marked his character, may have been shared by others. But where shall we go to find all these qualities united, concentrated, blended into one brilliant whole, and shedding a lustre upon one single head, which does not dazzle the beholder only because it attracts his love and demands his worship?