Over many mounds in our national cemetery the time-stains are growing very dark and the moss thick and undisturbed. As we wander among these with lips less pressed and stern, with perhaps a feeling of repenting forgiveness, slow though it be, towards those from whom politically or otherwise we have differed, and with occasional touches of tenderness, reluctant though at first they may come, for those who nobly erred, if err they did, straining for the right but missing it from the dimness of the light which they carried, let us be sure that in strolling often amid these head-stones, we shall thereby and thereafter be better prepared, by turning out our lower selves, to turn over profitably and pleasantly the pages of our newer National Album which holds a few of their portraits. If on its first leaves we are confronted by the faces of those whose lineaments—like Clay’s, Calhoun’s, Webster’s, Grundy’s, Van Buren’s, Quincy Adams’s, Jackson’s, and others—are associated with watch-words that touch party animosities that were born in us we know not how or when, and survive we know not why, we can, at least, learn to be justly proud of what has floated out from the drift-wood and dirty foam of ephemeral politics, which now no longer conceal their sturdy and solid timber growths. CLAY, CALHOUN, and WEBSTER! How much good ink was thrown uselessly away in bespattering them with blame or praise for the half-century during which they actively and industriously braided the public history of America through their triple biographies. Of this triumvirate, Mr. Clay was born in 1777, the two others five years later; Mr. Calhoun received the baptism of death in 1850, two years before his life-long competitors. They were the three American Fates, holding the distaff, the thread, and the shears of its history and administration. Utterly dissimilar in the place and circumstances of their births, educations, trainings, cultures, and courses, they yet supplied for each other the only parallels over that wide tract of time through which their prolonged lives reached.