long time, even in the North, a small and despised faction.  It was a great point gained when men of education and social standing, like Wendell Phillips (1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74), joined themselves to the cause.  Both of these were graduates of Harvard and men of scholarly pursuits.  They became the representative orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the platform and Sumner in the Senate.  The former first came before the public in his fiery speech, delivered in Faneuil Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at Alton, Ill., while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob.  Thenceforth Phillips’s voice was never idle in behalf of the slave.  His eloquence was impassioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, simple, and nervous.  He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other American orator.  He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes outside of politics, and his lecture on the Lost Arts was a favorite with audiences of all sorts.

Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his conscience.  He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection.  He was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society.  But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as Webster’s successor to the Senate of the United States.  Thereafter he remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress until slavery was abolished.  His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by “Bully Brooks” of South Carolina.  Sumner’s oratory was stately and somewhat labored.  While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to be surveying a “broad landscape of his own convictions.”  His most impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness and his thorough knowledge of his subject.  The most telling of his parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech On the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, of February 3, 1854, and On the Crime against Kansas, May 19 and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on the True Grandeur of Nations.

1.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Voices of the Night. The Skeleton in Armor. The Wreck of the Hesperus. The Village Blacksmith. The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems (1846). By the Seaside. Hiawatha. Tales of a Wayside Inn.

2.  Oliver Wendell Holmes. Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Elsie Venner. Old Ironsides. The Last Leaf. My Aunt. The Music Grinders. On Lending a Punch-Bowl. Nux Postcoenatica. A Modest Request. The Living Temple. Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College. Homesick in Heaven. Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Series. The Boys. Dorothy Q. The Iron Gate.