When he was stricken down in the Senate-chamber by the bludgeon of an assassin, his first conscious utterance as he recovered from the stupor caused by the terrible blows upon his head was that he would renew the conflict with slavery in the Senate as soon as he could return there. In his first public speech, a few weeks afterward, he said: "You have already made allusion to the suffering which I have undergone. This is not small, but it has been incurred in the performance of duty; and how small is it compared with that tale of woe which is perpetually coming to us from the house of bondage! With you I hail the omens of final triumph. I ask no prophet to confirm this assurance. The future is not less secure than the past." He prefixed to his own edition of his works the motto from Leibnitz:-- "Veniet fortasse aliud tempus, dignius nostro, Quo, debellatis odiis, veritas triumphabit." But there was no "fortasse" about it, to his confident and triumphant faith. He had a gentle, affectionate, and magnanimous nature, incapable of hatred or revenge. In spite of his severity of speech, his differences with men were differences of principle, never personal. There is no nobler sentence in political history than that with which he begins his first speech after his injury, when he got back from Europe and took his place again in the Senate:-- "Mr. President: Undertaking now, after a silence of more than four years, to address the Senate on this important subject, I should suppress the emotions natural to such an occasion, if I did not declare on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being through whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for the cause so near my heart. To the honored commonwealth whose representative I am, and also to my immediate associates in this body, with whom I enjoy the fellowship which is found _in thinking alike concerning the Republic_, I owe thanks, which I seize the moment to express, for indulgence extended to me throughout the protracted seclusion enjoined on me by medical skill; and I trust it will not be thought unbecoming in me to put on record here, as an apology for leaving my seat so long vacant, without making way, by resignation, for a successor, that I acted under the illusion of an invalid, whose hopes for restoration to natural health continued against oft recurring disappointment.