Of all his usefulness to nation, state and town; of all that he contributed to the glory of our country’s history—the brave defense of its unsullied past; the wise direction of its present purposes; the high ideals of its future progress—of these, others with equal knowledge, may speak with greater eloquence than I. I come especially to pay a simple tribute (time and occasion serve for nothing more) to the man himself—my boyhood’s, manhood’s companion, friend and lover. When on the day he died I nursed my selfish grief within the sacred precincts of a home which he had often beautified and rendered joyous by his presence; in the city of his birth, among the lanes his boyish feet had trod; amid scenes where his genius had first been plumed to flight; where he had felt the first touch of manhood’s aspirations and ambitions; where he had pressed his maiden suit of sacred love; where his dead hero-father lay at rest, and where the monumental shaft is reared to the base of which it was his ardent hope that he might bring his son to anoint him with the glories and the graces of a hero race—I thought no other’s sorrow could be as keen as mine. But lo! my neighbors shared an universal grief and draped their homes with sable tokens of their mourning hearts; the very children in the streets stopped in their Christmas play and spoke in whispers as in the presence of a dread calamity; and here, I find myself but one among a multitude to whom that great and noble heart had given of its gracious bounty and drawn them to himself by bonds of everlasting love that caused their tears to flow as freely as my own, in tribute to the sweetness, gentleness, magnetic joyousness of him that we have lost.
He was the very embodiment of love. A loving man; a man most lovable. Affection for his fellows welled from out his heart and overwhelmed in copious flood all brought within its touch. His love inspired counter-love in men of all degree. The aged marked his coming with a brightening smile; the young fell down and worshiped him. Unselfishness, the chiefest virtue men may claim—it carries all the others in its train—was possessed by him in unsurpassed degree. His generosity passed quick and far beyond the lines marked out by charity and overflowed the limits fixed by prudence. In fine, the gentler graces all were his:
His gentleness, his tenderness, his fair courtesy,
Were like a ring of virtues ’bout him set,
And God-like charity the center where all met.
Science and religion alike declare that force is indestructible. Some catch from one and some the other the inspiration that gives them faith and blessed hope that that great thing we call the Soul may live and work beyond that accident which we call Death, which comes with all the terrors of unfathomable mystery to free the fretting spirit from its carnal chains.
He had no special knowledge—nor cared for none—of scientific theory or philosophic speculation, but he had gained from deep religious thought—not technical theology perhaps, but true religion, the same that taught him to “visit the widows and fatherless in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world”—he had gained from this a deep, abiding conviction in a life beyond the grave. That this was true I know; for often we have talked of these great mysteries and, closeted together, have weighed the doubts the increasing knowledge of the centuries has brought, and I have never known a man whose convictions were as firm, and who, frankly and squarely meeting every doubt, retained unshaken faith with all his heart, soul and mind.
He held it truth with him who sings,
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men must rise on stepping-stones