People who have not yet examined these volumes, or at least have not yet looked through the volume containing the Index, have but a faint idea of their invaluable worth and character.  It would be impossible to write the history of the early life of this people under the constitution without borrowing material from the papers of Hamilton and of Madison.  Equally impossible will it be for the future historian to narrate, in just and equable proportion, the events from 1845 to 1874, without consulting the fifteen volumes which Mr. Sumner has left behind him.

But the distinguished senator from Massachusetts was not himself an historian; he was a close and painstaking student of history, as well as a rigid and critical observer of current events.  He kept himself thoroughly posted in the progress of his generation, and possessed the happy faculty of seeing things not alone as one within the circle of events but as one standing outside and afar off.  Consequently, his orations, senatorial speeches, miscellaneous addresses, letters and papers on current themes are not fraught with the transitory or ephemeral character, so common to heated discussions in legislative halls, but are singularly and as a whole among the grandest contributions to national history and growth.

These volumes cover, as we have already remarked, the period extending from 1845 to 1874, and they furnish a compendium of all the great questions which occupied the attention of the nation during that time, and which were discussed by him with an ability equalled by few and excelled by none of the great statesmen who were his contemporaries.  The high position which Mr. Sumner so long and so honorably held as one of the giant minds of the nation,—­his intimate connection with and leadership in the great measure of the abolition of slavery, and all the great questions of the civil war and those involved in a just settlement of the same, rendered it a desideratum that these volumes should be published.

Aside from their value as contributions to political history, the works, particularly the orations, of Mr. Sumner belong to the literature of America.  They are as far superior to the endless number of orations and speeches which are delivered throughout the country as the works of a polished, talented and accomplished author surpass the ephemeral productions of a day.  In one respect these orations surpass almost all others, namely, in the elevation of sentiment, the high and lofty moral tone and grandeur of thought which they possess.  The one on the “True Grandeur of Nations” stands forth of itself like a serene and majestic image, cut from the purest Parian marble.  There has been no orator in our time, whose addresses approach nearer the models of antiquity, unless it be Webster, whom Sumner greatly surpasses in moral tone and dignity of thought.