and his love of beauty, how every step of progress was made a starting-point for a new advance.  And from these, and other indications which these volumes contain, we can learn how modest he was, how gentle and courteous, how full of playfulness and graceful wit, how unprejudiced, how imbued with reverence for things high and sacred, how penetrated with delicate tact and sensitive propriety.  He nursed no displeasures; he cultivated no antipathies; he was free from dark suspicions, sullen resentments, and smouldering hates; he put no venom upon his blade.

The life and labors of a man like Mr. Choate present many points on which it would be easy to dwell with more or less of fulness, but we can only touch upon one or two.  We have always thought him especially remarkable for the felicity with which the elements in him were so mingled that the bright gift was not accompanied by the usually attendant shadow.  All would admit, for instance, that his temperament was the temperament of genius.  The strings of an Aeolian harp are not more responsive to the caressing wind than were the fibres of his frame sensitive to the influence of beauty.  His organization was delicate, nervous, and impassioned.  The grandeur and loveliness of Nature, fine poetry, stirring eloquence, music under certain forms and conditions, affected him to an extent to which men are rarely susceptible.  And yet with all these “robes and singing garlands” of genius about him, he was entirely free from the irritability which usually accompanies genius.  His temper was as sweet as his organization was sensitive.  The life of a lawyer in great practice is very trying to the spirit, but no one ever saw Mr. Choate discomposed or ruffled, and the sharp contentions of the most protracted and hotly contested trial never extorted from him a testy remark, a peevish exclamation, a wounding reflection.  He never wasted any of his nervous energy in scolding, fretting, or worrying.  Such invincible and inevitable sweetness of temper would have made the most commonplace man attractive:  we need not say what a charm it gave to such powers and accomplishments as those of Mr. Choate.

So, too, there is the old, traditionary commonplace about genius being one thing and application another, and their being in necessary antagonism to each other.  But Mr. Choate was a man of genius, at least in its popular and generally received sense.  The glance of his mind was as rapid as the lightning; he learned almost by intuition; his fancy was brilliant, discursive, and untiring; his perceptions were both quick and correct:  if there ever were a man who could have dispensed with the painful acquisitions of labor, and been content with the spontaneous growth of an uncultivated soil, that man was Mr. Choate.  And yet who ever worked harder than he? what plodding chronicler, what prosaic Dryasdust ever went through a greater amount of drudgery than he?  His very industry had the intense and impassioned character