“I am writing an oration, to be delivered before the societies of the Wesleyan University at Middletown, Connecticut,--unfortunately not until August; my theme is naturally the duty of the American scholar to politics; and as I remember the scholar John Milton, who was the great orator of Liberty in those days, I shall not forget, nor allow my audience to forget, the scholar who in later days--these very summer months, that will not then have passed by--stood in the same way, splendid, not only by the glory of his cause, but by the powers he consecrated to it, and by the wrongs he suffered for it.” Hon. E. Rockwood Hoar, afterwards Attorney-General, wrote from Concord, Massachusetts:-- “Courage and good cheer, my noble friend! We will stand by you in everything that head can devise or hand can execute. “If you had been killed, no man could desire a nobler epitaph than your speech; and you will live to say again, in many a form, and on many a fit occasion, the stinging home truths to which no reply could be found but this.” Edwin P. Whipple, of Boston, admired as a writer, wrote with the warmth of personal friendship:-- “You have been constantly in my mind and heart since the attempt at your assassination, and I must tell you how much I sympathize with the sentiments of your speech, how I glory in its genius, and how impossible it is for me to find words to express my rage and abhorrence in regard to the outrage that followed it. I cannot account for the course of Senator Butler, and of South Carolina, except on the supposition, that, fearing certain charitable persons might think you were too severe in your comments on them, they hastened to prove they were worse than it had ever entered your imagination to conceive them to be. “Your speech is more than a speech: it is an event. It would have been an event, had not your opponents answered it in the only way they were capable of answering it. It is much more so now. But your position, though more glorious than that of any other living man, has great responsibilities attached to it.” Chauncey Clark, an earnest constituent, of Northampton, Mass., wrote:--