After travelling in Switzerland, Germany, and Great Britain, he returned and took his seat in Congress, but, finding his health still impaired, he sailed again to Europe. He regretted to leave the country, but was, as he says, "often assured and encouraged to feel that to every sincere lover of civilization my vacant chair was a perpetual speech." On this second visit he came under the treatment of Dr. Brown-Séquard, who, when asked by Mr. Sumner what would cure him, replied, "Fire." At once the dreadful remedy was applied. The physician says, when he first met the senator, "He could not make use of his brain at all. He could not read a newspaper, could not write a letter. He was in a frightful state as regards the activity of the mind, as every effort there was most painful to him.... I told him the truth,--that there would be more effect, as I thought, if he did not take chloroform; and so I had to submit him to the martyrdom of the greatest suffering that can be inflicted on mortal man. I burned him with the first moxa. I had the hope that after the first application he would submit to the use of chloroform; but for five times after that he was burned in the same way, and refused to take chloroform. I have never seen a patient who submitted to such treatment in that way." Sumner wrote home: "It is with a pang unspeakable that I find myself thus arrested in the labors of life and in the duties of my position. This is harder to bear than the fire." Four years elapsed before he regained his health; indeed his death finally resulted from the attack of Brooks. No sooner had he returned to the Senate than he made another great speech against slavery. The country was agitated by the coming presidential election. John Brown had captured, with a force of twenty-two men, the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, with the fallacious hope of setting the slaves at liberty. He was of course overpowered, his sons killed at his side, as others of his sons had been on the Kansas battlefields, and he led out to execution, December 2, 1859, with a radiant face and an overflowing heart, because he knew that his death would arouse the nation to action. Mr. Sumner spoke to an immense audience at Cooper Institute, urging the election of Abraham Lincoln. By this election, he said, "we shall save the Territories from the five-headed barbarism of slavery; we shall save the country and the age from that crying infamy, the slave-trade; we shall help save the Declaration of Independence, now dishonored and disowned in its essential, life-giving truth,--_the equality of men_.... A new order of things will begin; and our history will proceed on a grander scale, in harmony with those sublime principles in which it commenced. Let the knell sound!--