Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 4

He wrote to Wendell Phillips, February 9—

Is it true that you are to lecture here next Friday? Then come direct from the station to my house, where you will be at home and welcome as long as you can stay. I hope you will find me much renovated. If not, then poisons fail in their work. God bless you!

During these weary months he did not conceal from intimate friends his depression of spirits; and of these were Wendell Phillips and E. L. Pierce, who were his guests,—the latter in January, and the former in February. For this it was easy to detect as the principal cause, in connection with ill health, his shock of disappointment that the country had decided as it had in the last election, and that his appeals and warnings had been ineffectual. He was oppressed by the legislative censure, which in a better condition of health and in a happier mood of mind he would have treated with indifference, or repelled as an impertinence. His friends assured him that partisan clamor never determined the permanent judgment of mankind.¹ His love of life, which was weak with him in youth,² was now weaker than ever. To Wilson, his old colleague, now Vice-President, who called to express sympathy and urge cessation from work, he said with great earnestness, as they sat alone in his study: ‘If my Works were completed, and my civil-rights bill passed, no visitor could enter that door that would be more welcome than Death.’³ By the middle of April, as spring opened in Washington, he attempted short walks and drives more regularly, walking two or three squares at a time; but such light exercise often exhausted him. On the first day of May he assisted at the wedding of his physician, and the same day called on Chief-Justice Chase; it was their last meeting,—six days before the latter's sudden death in New York. Their talk was chiefly of old times, old associates, and old conflicts, in which they had contended side by side; and they were in like agreement on current politics.⁴ The senator's ill health obliged him to decline the request of the chief-justice's family that he should serve as pall-bearer at the latter's funeral in New York. The two