These scenes have become very familiar to me, and their frequency reminds me with terrible force that—­

    All that lives must die,
    Passing through nature to eternity.

Most naturally am I more than usually touched and pained by the death of him which now hangs its somber drapery around the walls of our hearts and casts its pall over this Chamber.  It is a death within the representative circle of which I am a member.  It is the death of a colleague, a friend, whose presence in that circle always brought sunshine and never shadow.

Tributes to his memory, clothed in language of beauty and breathing with love and burning with pathos, have already been paid, and others will follow; and now, while I can not hope to charm with the tongue of eloquence or touch the soul with the figures of rhetoric, I come with my tribute.

It will be plain and unadorned, but it will at least have the merit of sincerity, and, like the widow’s mite, be all that I can give.

WILLIAM HENRY FITZHUGH LEE, of Virginia, is no more.

How the name of Lee, whenever uttered, wherever chivalry has erected her altar, sends a thrill like an electric current through every fiber of the manly man.

How the name of Virginia has been upon every tongue since Queen Elizabeth, nearly three centuries ago, gave that name to that section around which to-day historic memories linger and traditions and glories cluster as thick “as the stars in the crown of night,” the section where Christopher Newport and his devoted followers “builded an altar unto the Lord and in the savage wilderness” deposited the germ of this mighty nation, “and where God blessed them as He blessed Noah and his sons, saying unto them, ’The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.’”

Virginia!  The land of legends and lays—­the land where the cradle of republican liberty was rocked, and where, in 1765, the first denial was heard of the right of the British Parliament to levy taxes upon the Colonies which kindled the fire of patriotic fervor and led to the ever-living, soul-inspiring words of her Henry and the raising up of her Jefferson to heights of imperishable fame and her Washington to the pinnacle of everlasting renown.

Virginia!  The land of battlefields and battle gore, colonial relics and Revolutionary monuments, spotless fame and unsullied honor; the land of patriot soldiers and heroes, and of a Yorktown, where the tyrant’s head was bruised and the glorious strife ended which struck from our fathers the fetters and gave to them and their posterity a country gleaming in the golden sunlight of republican liberty, and throwing wide open her gates to the oppressed of every clime.