Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[146] its energy be turned into a wrong channel, or balked by fruitless experiments. Neither the slave nor the country must be cheated a second time.

Mr. Chairman, when I remember the grand port of these men elsewhere, and witness this confusion of ideas, and veiling of their proud crests to party necessities, they seem to me to lose in Washington something of their old giant proportions. How often have we witnessed this change! It seems the inevitable result of political life under any government, but especially under ours; and we are surprised at it in these men, only because we fondly hoped they would be exceptions to the general rule. It was Chamfort, I think, who first likened a republican senate-house to Milton's Pandemonium;--another proof of the rare insight French writers have shown in criticising republican institutions. The Capitol at Washington always brings to my mind that other Capitol, which in Milton's great epic “rose like an exhalation” “from the burning marl,” -- that towering palace, “with starry lamps and blazing cressets” hung,--with “roof of fretted gold” and stately height, its hall “like a covered field.” You remember, Sir, the host of archangels gathered round it, and how thick the airy crowd

Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount; or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees.
...
Thus incorporeal spirits to smallest forms
Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large,
Though without number still, amid the hall
Of that infernal court.

Mr. Chairman, they got no further than the hall