Dear angel! that blowest with breath of gladness
  The trump to waken the year in its grave,
  Shall we not hear, after death’s deep sadness,
  A voice as tender to gladden and save?

  Dost thou not sing a constant promise
  That joy shall follow that other voice,—­
  That nothing of good shall be taken from us,
  But all who hear it shall rise, to rejoice?

RUFUS CHOATE.

Mr. Choate’s mind was so complex, peculiar, and original,—­so foreign in temperament and spirit to the more representative traits of New England character,—­so large, philosophic, and sagacious in vision and survey of great questions, and so dramatic and vehement in their exposition and enforcement,—­so judicial and conservative in always maintaining in his arguments the balance and relation of interdependent principles, and so often in details marring the most exquisite poetry with the wildest extravagancies of style,—­so free from mere vulgar tricks of effect, and so full of imaginative tricksiness and surprises,—­so mischievous, subtle, mysterious, elusive, Protean,—­that it is no wonder he has been more admired and more misunderstood than any eminent American of his time.  It was because of these unaccustomed qualities of mind that matter-of-fact lawyers and judges came slowly but surely to Mr. Webster’s conclusion, that he was “the most accomplished of American lawyers,” whether arguing to courts or juries.  In the same way, critically correct but unimaginative scholars, who “can pardon anything but a false quantity,”—­who “see the hair on the rope, but not the rope,” and detect minute errors, but not poetic apprehension,—­admitted at last the fulness and variety of his scholastic attainments.  And perhaps the finest tribute to the power and subtlety of his influence was, that, to the last, juries, who began cases by steeling themselves against it, and who ended by giving him their verdicts, maintained that they were not at all influenced by him,—­so profound, so complete, and so unconscious had been the spell this man of genius had woven around them.

When it is remembered that a great lawyer in the United States is called upon (as he is not in England) to practise in all our courts, civil and criminal, law, equity, and admiralty, and, in addition to all the complicated questions between parties, involving life, liberty, and property, arising therein, that he is to know and discuss our whole scheme of government, from questions under its patent laws up to questions of jurisdiction and constitutional law,—­it will be seen what a field there is for the exhibition of the highest talents, and how few lawyers in the country can become eminent in all these various and important departments of mental labor.  In their whole extent Mr. Choate was not only thoroughly informed as a student and profound as a reasoner, but his genius produced such a fusion of imagination and understanding as to give creativeness to argumentation and philosophy to treatment of facts.