The end came peacefully, June 29, 1852, when he was seventy-six. On July 1 the body lay in state in the Senate chamber, and was then carried to Lexington. In all the principal cities through which the cortege passed, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and others, thousands gathered to pay their homage to the illustrious dead, weeping, and often pressing their lips upon the shroud. On July 10, when the body, having reached Lexington, was ready for burial, nearly a hundred thousand persons were gathered. In front of the Ashland home, on a bier covered with flowers, stood the iron coffin. Senators and scholars, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, mourned together in their common sorrow. The great man had missed the presidency, but he had not missed the love of a whole nation. The "mill-boy of the Slashes," winsome, sincere, had, unaided, become the only and immortal Henry Clay. [Illustration: CHARLES SUMNER.] CHARLES SUMNER. Henry Ward Beecher said of Charles Sumner: "He was raised up to do the work preceding and following the war. His eulogy will be, a lover of his country, an advocate of universal liberty, and the most eloquent and high-minded of all the statesmen of that period in which America made the transition from slavery to liberty." "The most eloquent and high-minded." Great praise, but worthily bestowed! Descended from an honorable English family who came to Massachusetts in 1637, settling in Dorchester, and the son of a well known lawyer, Charles Sumner came into the world January 6, 1811, with all the advantages of birth and social position. That he cared comparatively little for the family coat-of-arms of his ancestors is shown by his words in his address on "The True Grandeur of Nations." "Nothing is more shameful for a man than to found his title to esteem not on his own merits, but on the fame of his ancestors. The glory of the fathers is, doubtless, to their children, a most precious treasure; but to enjoy it without transmitting it to the next generation, and without adding to it yourselves,--this is the height of imbecility." Sumner added to the "glory of the fathers," not by ease and self-indulgence, not by conforming to the opinions of the society about him, but by a life of labor, and heroic devotion to principle. He had such courage to do the right as is not common to mankind, and such persistency as teaches a lesson to the young men of America. Charles was the oldest of nine children, the twin brother of Matilda, who grew to a beautiful womanhood, and died of consumption at twenty-one. The family home was at No. 20 Hancock Street, Boston, a four-story brick building.