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landmark, with the associations of the most exciting period of our national history clinging around it, was one in whom large gifts and rich acquirements were fused into the condensed energy and solid splendor of moral purpose.
He has died in his harness, with the dents of many conflicts upon his shield, and the serene light of victory on his crest.
But while among the great men who have fallen so thickly around us, there may have been those who matched him in ability, and excelled him in genius, we must look far and wide through our land, and through our age, to find any who have equalled him in this loyalty of conviction,—this sublime tenacity of righteousness.
For this, as he lies to-day in the Capitol of his grand old State, he is mourned and honored.
For this, to-morrow, the overshadowing regret of a nation, and the tears of an emancipated race, will follow to the grave of Charles Sumner.
Rev. O. B. Frothingham—the author of that noble Biography of a noble life—
Theodore Parker's:
Charles Sumner was a statesman who knew what statesmanship was meant for. He kept before him all the time the idea of the State.
He did not wish to put his hand into the treasury; he did not seek or ask to be sent to the Senate because he might have an independent fortune, for the reputation of a public man, complimented and flattered by his countrymen.
He felt himself a servant of the public.
He was a man who carried his consciousness so far that he seemed to be visionary, a man who so perpetually clung to the ideal that men said he was a man of one idea.
He was. He believed in God in government.
He sometimes erred; of course he did; he was a man. He cherished a profound and personal interest in the ideal of law, the ideal of government, and worked to bring about the time, if it ever could be brought about, when war should cease and slavery of all kinds be done away and the different conditions of men equalized, and justice, simple justice, should be done to the smallest man, the meanest man and woman in the land, and that these privileges should be extended over all the earth.
That was Charles Sumner.
He was a man who had the heart of a little child, but it was the heart of a little child of God.
Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler—
Some of the most soul-stirring eloquence of this generation came from the lips of Charles Sumner.
His utterances commanded a willing ear in two hemispheres.
He must be regarded as the impersonation of patriotism.
No soldier ever gave his life more willingly, nor did his
