Ah, Heaven! is anything sadder than to see a grand imperial soul, long worthy and secure of all love and honor, at length committing suicide, not by dying, but by living?  Ill it is when they that do deepest homage to a great spirit can no longer pray for the increase of his days; when there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost bravery of their affection must breathe, not Serus, but CITO in cadum redeas! O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, “How friendly is Death,—­Death, who restores us to free relations with the whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned and bound us hand and foot”?

Royal you are, royal in pity as in purpose; and you have done, nay, I trust may still be doing, imperishable work.  If only you did not hate democracy so bitterly as to be perpetually prostrated by the recoil of your own gun!  Right or wrong in its inception, this aversion has now become a chronic ailment, which drains insatiably at the fountains of your spiritual force.  I offer you the suggestion; I can do no more.

To have lost, in the hour of our trial, the fellowship of yourself, and of others in England whom we most delighted to honor, is a loss indeed.  Yet we grieve a thousand times more for you than for ourselves; and are not absorbed in any grief.  It is clear to us that the Eternal Providence has assigned us our tasks, not by your advice, nor by vote of Parliament,—­astonishing to sundry as that may seem.  Your opinion of the matter we hold, therefore, to be quite beside the matter; and drivel, like that of your nutshell-epic, by no means tends to make us wish that Providence had acted upon European counsel rather than upon His Own!  Moreover, we are very busy in these days, and can have small eye to the by-standers.  We are busy, and are likely to be so long; for the peace that succeeds to such a war will be as dangerous and arduous as the war itself.  We have as little time, therefore, to grieve as to brag or bluster; we must work.  We neither solicit nor repel your sympathy; we must work,—­work straight on, and let all that be as it can be.

We seek not to conceal even from you that our democracy has great weaknesses, as well as great strength.  Mean, mercenary, and stolid men are not found in England alone; they are ominously abundant here also.  We have lunatic radicalisms as well as sane, idiotic conservatisms as well as intelligent.  Too much for safety, our politics are purulent, our good men over-apt to forget the objects of government in a besotted devotion to the form.  It is possible we may yet discover that universal suffrage can be a trifle too universal,—­that it should pause a little short of the state-prison.  New York must see to it that the thief does not patronize the judge, and sit in the prisoner’s box as on the bench of a higher court.  Our democracy has somewhat to learn; it knows that it has somewhat to learn, and says cheerfully, “What is the use of living without learning?”