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He had spent the Christmas holidays of 1877 with his children in New York, and was with them again in May, for a fortnight.
The greater part of July, August, and September, 1878, he passed with his daughter and her family at Tarrytown, on the Hudson, a region appealing strongly to his love of the beautiful and romantic in nature.
There he rested quietly for weeks, enjoying the lovely outlook upon the Hudson and Tappan Zee, playing at ninepins with his grandchildren, driving to Sleepy Hollow and other places in the vicinity, and making excursions up the river to the Military Academy at West1 Point, and to Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, by way2 of contrast.
He also spent a few days at Osterville, on3 Cape Cod, and in September went to Philadelphia to see Lucretia Mott and other friends.
In June he had been summoned to Florence, Mass., to speak at the funeral of Charles C. Burleigh,4 and early in5
4 Mr. Burleigh came to a premature death through injuries received from a passing railroad train. ‘For more than forty years,’ wrote Mr. Garrison of him, ‘he was almost constantly in the lecturing field, during which period he travelled many thousands of miles, addressed hundreds of thousands of hearers, cheerfully encountering every hardship, serenely confronting mobocratic violence, shrinking from no peril, heedless of unescapable ridicule (stimulated and intensified by the non-conformity of the outward man in the matter of dress, the wearing of the hair and beard); yet evincing such a mastery of his subject, such powers of argument and persuasion, such force of intellect and breadth of mind, such copiousness of speech and fertility of illustration on every question discussed, as made it an easy task for him to confound and vanquish all opponents. Indeed, he never found “a foeman worthy of his steel.” . . . He never lost his balance. Whoever else, in the heat and conflict of reform, might be led into extravagance of speech, or bitterness of invective, or error of reasoning, his self-control was absolute, his presentation of the case singularly dispassionate, his accusations and impeachments within the truth, his supreme effort not to “bring down the house” but to enlighten and convert it. At the bar, before a jury, he would hardly have found his peer; on the judicial bench he would have been chief’ (Ms. written for publication, but not used).
5 June 16.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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