"The President of the United States and the heads of departments tender to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts their condolence on the lamented death of Edward Everett, who was worthy to be enrolled among the noblest of the nation's benefactors." Why do you call that man a private citizen, to whom every officer in the Nation, in the Commonwealth, and in the City, unites in paying homage? Why do you select the leading man in every class of service to be present to represent you at his open grave? The true answer to these questions, and the true explanation of the universal feeling expressed in public and in private when he died, are not found without reference to some traits of moral constitution, to which it is well, I believe, to call attention now. To those traits of character,--as shown through life,--rather than to specific gifts of intellectual power, is Mr. Everett's singularly varied success to be ascribed. You may say, if you please, that it requires a very rare mental genius and even very rare physical endowment to carry out the behests of such resolution as I am to describe. This, of course, is true. But unless you have the moral determination which compels your vivid mind to plan, and your well-built machine to work for you, you get no such life. The secret--if it is to be called such--of this wonderful life, is the determination to do the special thing which at the moment is to be done. Mr. Everett was no admirer of Carlyle. But long before Carlyle began to tell men "to do the thing that came next them," Mr. Everett had been doing it, with a steady confidence that he could do it. Now the things that come next men in America are very various. That is the reason why he has been doing very various things. That is the reason why President and Cabinet, Navy and Army, University, Bench, and Academy, City and Commonwealth, meet, by their first representatives, at his grave, in recognition of specific service of the most eminent character which he has rendered to each of them, and which it would be a shame for them to fail to own. In a little sketch of his college life, which he once sent me, there is an estimate--made at the age of sixty-one--of his own standing when he was a Sophomore, in comparison with some of his classmates. Some of those he names have passed on before him; two of them remain with us, to be honored always for the fruits of that scholarship which he observed so young. I think there can be nothing wrong in publishing a recollection, which, by accident, gives a hint as to the method of his own after-life to which I have alluded.