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

[638] to a national entity,—her various kingdoms, duchies, pontifical states, provinces of a foreign dynasty, all becoming one country, which stretches the length of the historic peninsula. It has seen likewise Germany, no longer a mere dream of patriots and idealists, at last consolidated as one people, and realizing the fatherland of patriotism and of song. At this hour it sees in the far East the Greek race, in whose language mankind has found its culture, its philosophy, and its religion, yearning for a nationality commensurate with the common speech, and centred in a renowned capital on the Aegean or the Bosphorus. Such a generation will respond with sympathy to Sumner's thought of Canada joining speedily the sisterhood of American States, even if with a seer's instinct he anticipated, as he often did, the fulness of time. In the final week of his life, even on the very day he left the Senate for the last time, at whose close he was smitten with mortal agony, he was finishing his ‘Prophetic Voices concerning America,’ in which he had gathered what from age to age had been foretold of her greatness and destiny; and among these he placed his friend Cobden's contemplation of the coining union of Canada with us. What nobler epitaph can be written of an American statesman than this,—that after an illustrious career of devotion to universal liberty, carrying into age the fresh hopes of youth, he died, cherishing fondly the vision that the country he had loved and served was to grow in peace to an empire wide as the domains of the English-speaking race on this continent!