An eloquent member of the House of Representatives, from your state, has compared this southern luminary to that remarkable constellation the Southern Cross. A few years since, in sailing to a West Indian island, I had a perilous voyage, but have ever felt that the sight of that Southern Cross, which had long haunted my imagination, almost repaid me for its excitement and suffering. And thus do I regard an acquaintance with this intellectual star as one great compensation for a separation from my early home. It would have been a loss not to have seen that poetic group, which greets the traveller as he sails southward, but how much greater the loss, never to have beheld that unique luminary which has set to rise no more upon our visible horizon. Mr. Calhoun's public character is so well known to you that I shall speak of him principally in his private relations, and shall refer to his opinions only as expressed in conversation--for it was in the repose of his happy home, in the tranquillity of domestic life, and in the freedom of social intercourse, that I knew him. While the clarion-notes of his fame resound among the distant hills and valleys of our land, while those who in political strife crossed lances with this champion of the south nobly acknowledge his valor and his honor, while Carolina chants a requiem for her departed dead, may not one who knows his moral elevation, and who has witnessed his domestic virtues, have the consolation of adding an unaffected tribute to his memory? While his devoted constituents, with impressive symbols and mournful pageants, perform funereal rites, erect for him the costly marble, weave for him the brilliant chaplet, be it mine to scatter over his honored tomb simple but ever green leaflets. While in glowing colors the orator portrays him on his peerless career in the political arena, be it mine to delineate the daily beauty of his life.