dearest and most indifferent, for all breathing things about him, the overflow of the kindest heart growing in gentleness and benevolence—­paternal, patriarchal affections, seeming to become more natural, warm, and communicative every hour.  Softer and yet brighter grew the tints on the sky of parting day; and the last lingering rays, more even than the glories of noon, announced how divine was the source from which they proceeded; how incapable to be quenched; how certain to rise on a morning which no night should follow.

Such a character was made to be loved.  It was loved.  Those who knew and saw it in its hour of calm—­those who could repose on that soft green—­loved him.  His plain neighbors loved him; and one said, when he was laid in his grave, “How lonesome the world seems!” Educated young men loved him.  The ministers of the gospel, the general intelligence of the country, the masses afar oft, loved him.  True, they had not found in his speeches, read by millions, so much adulation of the people; so much of the music which robs the public reason of itself; so many phrases of humanity and philanthropy; and some had told them he was lofty and cold—­solitary in his greatness; but every year they came nearer and nearer to him, and as they came nearer, they loved him better; they heard how tender the son had been, the husband, the brother, the father, the friend, and neighbor; that he was plain, simple, natural, generous, hospitable—­the heart larger than the brain; that he loved little children and reverenced God, the Scriptures, the Sabbath-day, the Constitution, and the law—­and their hearts clave unto him.  More truly of him than even of the great naval darling of England might it be said that “his presence would set the church bells ringing, and give schoolboys a holiday, would bring children from school and old men from the chimney-corner, to gaze on him ere he died.”  The great and unavailing lamentations first revealed the deep place he had in the hearts of his countrymen.

You are now to add to this his extraordinary power of influencing the convictions of others by speech, and you have completed the survey of the means of his greatness.  And here, again I begin by admiring an aggregate made up of excellences and triumphs, ordinarily deemed incompatible.  He spoke with consummate ability to the bench, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon of taste and ethics, the bench ought to be addressed.  He spoke with consummate ability to the jury, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon, that totally different tribunal ought to be addressed.  In the halls of Congress, before the people assembled for political discussion in masses, before audiences smaller and more select, assembled for some solemn commemoration of the past or of the dead—­in each of these, again, his speech, of the first form of ability, was exactly adapted, also, to the critical properties of the place; each achieved, when delivered, the most instant and specific success of eloquence—­some of them in a splendid and remarkable degree; and yet, stranger still, when reduced to writing, as they fell from his lips, they compose a body of reading in many volumes—­solid, clear, rich, and full of harmony—­a classical and permanent political literature.