It was all I could do to deny a chapter to William H. Seward. He seems to me to have been the only northern man whose foresight of the coming convulsion equalled that of Calhoun. He did not become a Jeremiah as the other did, for his section was not, after it had just emerged from a gulf of blood, to be plunged and held for years in a gulf of poverty and disorder. He was far less serious and much more optimistic in his nature than Calhoun. Affectionate, sympathetic, rarely agreeable in his manners--how well Mrs. Davis depicts him in what is to me one of the pleasantest passages of her book.[3] He was spoils politician, able popular leader, and great statesman in rare combination. While his heart was extremely warm, his head was never turned by his feelings. Lincoln ardently believed in his soul what Choate calls "the glittering generalities" of the declaration of independence. But to Seward current illusions were the same as they were to Napoleon Bonaparte--he was to lead the masses with them just as far as possible, but not to deceive himself. Read in your closet his two epochal speeches, the "higher law" one of March 11, 1850, and that proclaiming the irrepressible conflict at Rochester, October 25, 1858, then read that of Chase at the Peace Congress, and you cannot avoid feeling that while Chase opposes slavery mainly because he conceives it to be a gross moral wrong, the other opposes because it is the belonging of an inferior civilization. In my opinion no man of that time had such a clear conception as Seward of the utter economical incompatibility of the free-labor system and the slave-labor system, and of the doom of the latter in their conflict then on. While he had this superior insight and wisdom it was the better way for him to follow the tide of morbid moral sentiment and unreasoning zeal carrying the country on to his goal. Following thus he proved a leader unsurpassed. The longer I contemplate Seward the stronger becomes my conviction that he is the most entertaining subject and the most delightful in variety of parts and traits of all American statesmen for the essayist portrait painter. To give a picture true to life demands the very best and highest art.