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to him for all his magnificent services to freedom and public morals.
In the anguish of my heart I cry out, “Enemies wrote to him, and friends did not!
And all the while he was dying by inches!”
Processions and flowers and panegyrics have become so much a matter of custom that they are generally distasteful to me, as are all things that degenerate into forms without significance.
But the homage to the memory of Charles Sumner seems to be really spontaneous and almost universal.
It is a great consolation to me, not only because he richly deserved it, but because it is a good omen from the nation.
There has been nothing like it except the mourning for Abraham Lincoln; and in both cases it was preeminently honesty of character to which the people paid spontaneous homage.
They reverenced the men because they trusted them.
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