Oh, what a cause he had! If successful, unfolded glories of the Union of future times; the sweet and swelling harmonies of the ever-increasing choir of free and happy States; the grand ideals of the venerable fathers all realized, and every bloom of American hope fruited in happiness, in love, in liberty, in enduring peace!
And if unsuccessful! If he and those to come must plead in vain for the unity as well as union of the country, then the dread doubt whether all peace is to be only preparation for deadly grapplings; the dread doubt whether, as in England and Scotland, these feuds are to harry our homes and our hearts for hundreds of years!
What a cause! and, thank God, what an advocate! It would seem that our own Southern sun had warmed and sweetened him for the work. He exactly fitted the culmination and mission of his life. His noble soul propelled his thoughts. His eloquence rushed from mountain-side fountains, pure and bold and free. His reasoning was so blended with appeal that the one took the shape of stating truths in sequence, and his appeal seemed responsive to the heart-beats of his listeners.
Thus the cause, the advocate and the occasion met, and once more in New England a Southern man was applauded as an American patriot. With the triple levers of his great soul and mind and tongue he moved two mighty sections, with all their weights of passions of victory and passions of defeat, with all their weights of misconceptions and misjudgments. With his hands he moved these mighty bodies nearer each to the heart of the other—nearer to that true Union for which the real heart of this country, in every part of it, beats with the pulses of a devoted love, never entirely to be stilled.
Oh, how nobly he must have been inspired as he felt the “rock-ribbed and iron-bound” prejudice of New England quiver to the touch of his magic hand; and as her snow began to melt under the warmth of his great heart, surely he was the sunshine of this great land!
But, oh, the grief of it—the bitter, bitter grief of it! Just as we knew how noble and great he was, he sank below the horizon of life, never to rise again!
I shall always recall him as dying like that lad from Lombardy, pictured by Browning. I shall think that the South, decked like a queen in all her jewels of glory and of love, came to his dying couch and said:
“Thou art a Lombard, my brother! Happy art thou,” she cried,
And smiled like Italy on him. He dreamed in her face and died!