Death brings simplicity and reality. As it approaches, learning and philosophy go; goodness and conscience are left, the last guests in the feast of life at the table of the heart. In Sumner the _sentiment_, foremost always, blooms at the pillow where last he laid, "so tired and weary," his head; and sentiment, as well as science, has eternal claim. He extends courtesy to callers, opens his eye while it could open, waves his hand while it had strength to move, says _Sit down_ to his old associate, tries to speak when the lips no longer obey the will, and sends a legacy of love and reverence more precious than any gold to his old friend. _Cold_ was he indeed? For his noble affections, how we shall remember the solitary and little-related man, with no children, when he was sad, to play with in his house! His thirst for knowledge, his bent to investigate and study whatever had been said and done in the world, would have made him an antiquarian save for his patriotic and humanitarian zeal. What a lover and knower he was of pictures, bronzes, manuscripts, old books, curious relics of the past, all memorials in all time of his fellow-men! Such research is a sort of humanity. Yet no man's sympathies were more in the present than his, or more eager to stretch after a perfected civilization in the future. Indeed, the millennial day shone so upon him through the vista of hope as to dazzle and blind him, like Saul on the road to Damascus, to the immediate possibilities of action and direct bearings of his theme. If there were any defect in his style, it was a certain lack of proportion, or an exceeding uniform stress, a straining forward against the leash of irrefragable circumstance, till in the ardor of pursuit the perspective of the subject was lost. But whatever might be the lesser vices, the great virtues were in his judgment and thought. He was an admirable inciter. How we needed incentives! He hallooed to a grander chase than any huntsman's. He was the Lamartine of America, _our_ orator of the human race. The Senate floor was to him a popular rostrum and sacred stump. He advocated every great cause if he found the key of none. He roused England and the United States, kindling into white heat, like dry wood, after such long seasoning, the Alabama difficulties, and compelling an attention which doubtless was good for both parties, although his extravagant statement of the doctrine of consequential damages could not settle the question, and failed of the seal and sanction of international law. More human than divine, his inspiration came from without rather than from within. The first time I saw him, forty years ago, with the same characteristic ornate and fervent language, and garnish of Latin references, he elucidated to me the difference between a pettifogger or litigious searcher for cases--a _praeco actionum_ as he called him--and a jurist of the Judge Story stamp.