He was an apt pupil and laid up in his heart the great lessons of the Book of Truth. His visit to Europe served to complete his apprenticeship. It was like Hercules going into the Nemean forest to cut himself a club. The same grand object lesson he saw everywhere--man, human society, human thoughts, human strivings, human wrong, human misery. Beneath differences of language, governments, religion, race, color, he discerned the underlying human principle and passion, which make all races kin, all men brothers. In strange and distant lands he found the human heart with its friendships, heroisms, beatitudes, the human intellect with its never ending movement and progress. He found home, a common destiny wherever he found common ideas and aspirations. And these he had but to look around to behold. He felt himself a citizen of an immense over-nation, of a vast world of federated hopes and interests. When the plan for this visit had taken shape in his own mind, he consulted his friends, Judge Story, Prof. Greenleaf, and President Quincy, who were not at all well affected to it. The first two thought it would wean him from his profession, the last one that Europe would spoil him, "send him back with a mustache and a walking-stick." Ah! how little did they comprehend him, how hard to understand that this young and indefatigable scholar was only going abroad to cut himself a club for the Herculean labors of his ripe manhood. He went, saw, and conquered. He saw the promised land of international fellowship and peace, and conquered in his own breast the evil genius of war. He came back proud that he was an American, prouder still that he was a man. The downfall of the Whigs of Massachusetts, brought about by a coalition of the Free Soil and the Democratic parties, resulted after a contest in the Legislature lasting fourteen weeks, in the election on April 24, 1851, of Charles Sumner to the Senate of the United States. He was just forty, was at the meridian of the intellectual life, in the zenith of bodily vigor and manly beauty. He attained the splendid position by sheer worth, unrivalled public service. Never has political office, I venture to assert, been so utterly unsolicited. He did not lift a finger, scorned to budge an inch, refused to write a line to influence his election. The great office came to him by the laws of gravitation and character--to him the clean of hand, and brave of heart. It was the hour finding the man.