But if his were a secondary mind, a vine round a stouter trunk, how like some such creeper it towered and grew, appropriated nourishment and vigor from the old decaying boughs, till at length, with superior toughness and tenacity, it could breast every breeze, and stood proudly alone! Yet his understanding was that not of the revealer, but the scholar to the last. He imparted what he learned; he knew what he had been told. His delivery was not, like Patrick Henry's, a bolt from Heaven to rend the obstacle and burn up opposition, but a crystal stream flowing smoothly from some rock that had garnered up the mountain-dew and the rain; and he completely informed if he did not like Fisher Ames irresistibly charm. But in the moral region lay the real greatness of the man. His conscience was original and he had no original sin. No imputation on his purpose but cleared away like the cloud from a breath on spotless steel, leaving the metal bright as before. He was as incorruptible as he honorably said to me was Fessenden, his great rival in the Senate; and when he also one day, speaking of his limited means, remarked: "I have never had the art to get my hands into the Treasury," I was fain to answer, "You the whole man are in the Treasury yourself." He was indeed in our politics a fund and never-broken bank of moral wealth. Justice was his inspiration. He was a prophet by equity. Righteousness was his genius; and humanity, in any lack of imagination, his insight and foresight. He was without spot. He wore ermine though he sat not on the bench. John Jay had not cleaner hands, nor John Marshall a more honest will; Hamilton and Jefferson were no more patriotic in contending than he in every legal or congressional strife; and Story, his favorite teacher, and whose favorite pupil he was, no more opulent in knowledge or innocent in its use. As an antagonist, handling questions of motive or policy, he was as frank as the lion-hearted Richard and simple as a child. From those early debates to which I listened, on prison discipline, thirty years ago, to his latest speech on the Centennial Exhibition, this candor, amounting to generosity and magnanimity, was plain as the sun. He had no tricks, no management, no intrigue. He showed his hand. Could he not prevail by openness and sincerity, he would not prevail at all. If he started no new ideas or measures that have been adopted precisely in the way he conceived, or shape he gave, he mightily sustained all good ones, and of their goodness he would not abate a tithe.