adds to the weight of the bereavement. The tears which fell around his bedside and on his bier still

"Weep a loss forever new."

With every passing day we turn, but turn in vain, to catch his hopeful tone, his discriminating judgment, his philosophic foresight, and his courageous patriotism. They only come to us in memory and in mourning. His lips are sealed; his eye is dim; his brain is shrouded; his heart is still; and the nation stands with throbbing heart at his grave. "His virtue is treasured in our hearts; his death is our despair." It is no mere ceremonial, therefore, that the national Legislature, in whose counsels he has taken so prominent a part, should pause, even in extraordinary session, to bestow that homage which friendship, intellect, and patriotism ever offer to the true man, the gifted soul, and the enlightened statesman.

Judge DOUGLAS struggled into greatness. He had no avenue to honor except that which was open to all. The power and patronage which aided him, he created; and the wealth which he made and spent so freely, came from no ancestral hand. Part teacher and part cabinet maker, he left the East for the ruder collisions of border life. There he grew up under the adversities which strengthened him into a vigorous and early maturity. His own manhood soon made itself felt. He became the political necessity of his State. He filled many of its most important offices before he became nationally known. The Democratic people of the Union were soon attracted to him. As early as 1848 they began to think of him as their candidate for President; while, in 1852, the Democratic Review hailed him as the coming man; a man who had no grandfather or other incident of biographical puffery; as one whose genealogical tree had been sawed up; as a graduate from the university of the lathe; as one with the materials, the mind, and the energy to shape, fashion, and make enduring, a platform of his own.

No notice of STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS is complete which does not remark upon the singular magnetism of his personal presence, the talismanic touch of his kindly hand, the gentle amenities of his domestic life, and the ineradicable clasp of his friendships. It may not be improper to refer to the fact that I was one among the many young men of the West who were bound to him by a tie of friendship and a spell of enthusiasm which death has no power to break. These are the pearls beneath the rough shell of his political life. There are many here who will understand me, when I recall the gentle tone and the cordial greeting with which he used to woo and win and hold the young partisans of his faith, and the warm promoters of his success. Ever ready with his counsel, his means, and his energies, he led them as much by the persuasiveness of his heart as the logic of his head. The same gentle demeanor which fondled his children and taught them a beauty of manners beyond all praise, the same pure respect and tenderness with which he treated his noble wife and companion, silvered the cords of attachment which bound his friends to him, and made his home at Washington and his sojourns elsewhere recollections as sweet as memory can embalm.

While others bear testimony to his moral heroism, intellectual prowess,

fixedness of principle, and unstained patriotism, it seems that his spirit, if it hovers over this scene of his obsequies, would receive with purest delight these tributes of friendly affection. I recall in my own experience, which runs with unbroken association of friendship with him from the first year of my political life, many of his acts of unselfish devotion; many words outspoken to the public, which the mere designing politician would not have uttered; many tenders of aid and counsel, which were the more grateful because unsought, and the more serviceable because they came from him. It is one of the felicities of my life that I have been the recip ient of his kindness and confidence; and that the people whom I represent were cherished by him, as he was by them, with the steadfastness of unalloyed devotion.

It was his pleasure very often to sojourn in the capital city of Ohio, where, regardless of party, the people paid him the respect due to his character and services. Among the last of the associations which he had with Ohio was his address, a few weeks before his death, to the people at its capital, on the invitation of the State Legislature. His stirring tones still thrill on the air, protesting for the right and might of the Great West to egress through our rivers and highways to the sea against all hostile obstruction, and for the maintenance of the Government, threatened by the great revolution which yet surrounds us. His last utterance was the fit climax of a life devoted to the study of this Government, and of a patriotism which never swerved from its love for the Union. It was worth whole battalions of armed men. A word from him made calm from tempest, and resolved doubt into duty. His thought swayed the tides of public opinion as vassals to his will. After his hot contests in the Senate, during the first session of the last Congress; after his Harper essay in development of his political theories; after his heroic campaign in the South, closing at Norfolk in his courageous reply to the questions of the disunionists; after his struggles of last winter, when he strung his energies to the utmost in pleading for peace and conciliation; after all had failed, and secession stalked with haughty head through the land, and even jeoparded this metropolis of the nation, it was the consummate glory of his life to have given his most emphatic utterance for the maintenance of the Government, even though its administration was committed to his old political antagonist, and although he knew that such expressions imperilled the lives of a hundred thousand of his friends.

Scarcely with any of our public men can DOUGLAS be compared. The people like to compare him to Jackson, for his energy and honesty. He was like the great triumvirate-Clay, Webster, and Calhoun-but "like in difference." Like them in his gift of political foresight, still he had a power over the masses possessed by neither. Like Clay, in his charm to make and hold friends and to lead his party; like Webster, in the massive substance of his thought, clothed in apt political words; like Calhoun, in the tenacity of his purpose and the subtlety of his dialectics; he yet surpassed them all in the homely sense, the sturdy strength, and indomitable persistence with which he wielded the masses and electrified the Senate.

In the onslaught of debate he was ever foremost; his crest high and his falchion keen. Whether his antagonists numbered two or ten, whether

the whole of the Senate were against him, he could "take a raking fire at the whole group." Like the shrouded Junius, he dared Commons, Lords, and King, to the encounter; but unlike that terrible shadow, he sought no craven covert, but fought in the open lists, with a muscular and mental might which defied the unreasoning cries of the mob and rolled back the thunders of the Executive anathema!

DOUGLAS was no scholar, in the pedantic sense of the term. His reading was neither classical nor varied. Neither was he a sciolist. His researches were ever in the line of his duty, but therein they were thorough. His library was never clear from dust. His favorite volume was the book of human nature, which he consulted without much regard to the binding. He was skilled in the contests of the bar; but he was more than a lawyer-he easily separated the rubbish of the law from its essence. As a jurist, his decisions were not essays; they had in them something decisive, after the manner of the best English judges. As a legislator, his practicalness cut away the entanglements of theoretic learning and ancient precedent, and brought his mind into the presence of the thing to be done or undone. Hence he never criticized a wrong for which he did not provide a remedy. He never discussed a question that he did not propose a measure.

His style was of that plain and tough fibre which needed no ornament. He had a felicity in the use of political language never equalled by any public man. He had the right word for the right place. His interrogative method, and his ready and fit replies, gave dramatic vivacity to his debates. Hence the newspapers readily copied them, and the people retentively remembered them. Gleams of humor were not infrequent in his speeches, as in his conversation. His logic had the reach of the rifled cannon, which annihilated while it silenced the batteries of his opponents.

DOUGLAS was a partisan; but he never wore his party uniform when his country was in danger. His zeal, like all excess, may have had its defect; but to him who observes the symmetry and magnanimity of his life, it will appear that he always strove to make his party conservative of his country. The tenacity with which he clung to his theory of territorial government, and the extension of suffrage, on local questions, from State to Territory, and the absolute non-intervention by Congress for the sake of peace and union, while it made him enemies, increased the admiration of his friends. His nature shines out with its loftiest grace and courage in his debates on these themes, so nearly connected as he thought them with the stability of the Republic.

If it be that every true man is himself a cause, a country, or an age; if the height of a nation is the altitude of its best men, then, indeed, are these enlarged liberalities, which are now fixed as American institutions, but the lengthened shadow of STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS. This is the cause-selfgovernment in State and Territory-with which he would love most to be identified in his country's history. He was ready to follow it to any logical conclusion, having faith in it as a principle of repose, justice, and union. Placed at the head of the Territorial Committee, it was his hand which, on this basis, fashioned Territory after Territory, and led State after State into the Union. The latest constellation, formed by California, Iowa, Oregon, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and I may add Kansas, received

their charter to shine and revolve under his hand. These States, faithful to his fostering, will ever remain as monuments of his greatness!

Ilis comprehensive forecast was exhibited in his speech on the Clayton and Bulwer treaty, on the 4th of March, 1853; wherein he enforced a continental policy suitable and honorable to the New World and its destiny, now so unhappily obscured. That speech was regarded by Judge DOUGLAS as among the most valuable, as I think it the most finished and cogent speech of his life. His philippic against England, which to-day has its vindication in her selfish conduct towards us, will remind the scholar of Demosthenes, while his enlarged philosophy has the sweep and dignity of Edmund Burke. It was this speech which gave to DOUGLAS the heart of Young America. He refused to prescribe limits to the area over which Democratic principles might safely spread. "I know not what our destiny may be. But," he continued, "I try to keep up with the spirit of the age; to keep in view the history of the country; see what we have done, whither we are going, and with what velocity we are moving, in order to be prepared for those events which it is not in the power of man to thwart." He would not then see the limits of this giant Republic fettered by treaty; neither would he in 1861 see them curtailed by treachery. If he were alive to-day, he would repeat with new emphasis his warning against England and her unforgiving spite, wounded pride, and selfish policy. When, in 1847, he advocated the policy of terminating her joint occupation with us of Oregon, he was ready to back it by military force; and if war should result, "we might drive Great Britain and the last vestiges of royal authority from the continent of North America, and make the United States an ocean-bound Republic!"

With ready tact and good sense he brought to the fiscal and commercial problems of the country views suitable to this age of free interchange and scientific advancement. His position on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate gave him a scope of view abroad, which was enriched by European travel and historic research, and which he ever used for the advancement of our flag and honor among the nations. His knowledge of our domestic troubles, with their hidden rocks and horrid breakers, and the measures he proposed to remove them, show that he was a statesman of the highest rank, fit for calm or storm.

Some have lamented his death now as untimely and unfortunate for his own fame, since it has happened just at the moment when the politician was lost in the patriot, and when he had a chance to atone for past error by new devotion. Mr. Speaker, men do not change their natures so easily. The DOUGLAS of 1861 was the DOUGLAS of 1850, 1854, and 1858. The patriot who denounced this great rebellion was the patriot in every fold and lineament of his character. There is not a page of his history that we can afford to blot. The words which escaped him in the delirium of his last days-when he heard the "battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting"-were the key-note to a harmonious life. Observant of the insidious processes North and South which have led us to this civil war, he ever strove, by adjustment, to avoid their disastrous effects. History will be false to her trust, if she does not write that STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS was a patriot of matchless purity, and a statesman who, foreseeing and warning, tried his utmost to avert the dangers

upon

which are now so hard to repress. Nor will she permit those who now praise his last great effort for the Union to qualify it by sinister reflections his former conduct; for thus they tarnish the lustre of a life devoted, in peace and in war, to the preservation of the Union. His fame never had eclipse. Its disk has been ever bright to the eye of history. It sank below the horizon, like the sun of the Morea, full-orbed, and in the full blaze of its splendor. How much we shall miss him here! How can we, his associates, do without his counsel? No longer does the murmur go round that DOUGLAS is speaking in the Senate; no longer does the House become quorumless to listen to his voice! His death is like the dissolution of a political organism. Indeed, we could better afford to lose a sphere of stars from our flag; for these might wander to return. But DOUGLAS cannot be brought back to us. He who had such a defiant power, with the "thews of Anakim and the pulses of a Titan's heart,” has gone upon a returnless journey. How much shall we miss him now! We have so long regarded the political, social, geographical, and commercial necessities to which our Government was adapted as rendering it eternal, that its present condition calls for new and rare elements of statesmanship. Are we equal to the time and the trust? Oh! for a Clay, a Webster, a DOUGLAS, in this great ordeal of constitutional freedom! While the country is entangled by these serpents of revolution, we shall miss the giant-the Hercules of the West-whose limbs had grown sinewy in strangling the poisonous brood!

Who is left to take his place? Alas! he has no successor. His eclipse is painfully palpable, since it makes more obscure the path by which our alienated brethren may return. Many Union men, friends of DOUGLAS in the South, heard of his demise as the death knell of their loyal hope. Who, who can take his place? The great men of 1850, who were his mates in the Senate, are gone, we trust, to that better Union above, where there are no distracting counsels-all, all gone! All? No! thank Heaven! Kentucky still spares to us one of kindred patriotism, fashioned in the better mould of an earlier day-the distinguished statesman who has just spoken [Mr. CRITTENDEN], whose praise of DoUGLAS living I loved to quote, and whose praise of DOUGLAS dead, to which we have just listened, “laudari a viro laudato," is praise indeed; CRITTENDEN still stands here, lifting on high his whitened head, like a Pharos in the sea, to guide our storm-tossed and storm-tattered vessel to its haven of rest. His feet tread closely upon the retreating steps of our statesman of the West. In the order of nature, we cannot have him long. Already his hand is outstretched into the other world to grasp the hand of DOUGLAS! While we have him, let us heed his warning, learn from his lips the lessons of moderation and loyalty of the elder days, and do all and do it nobly for our beloved Republic!

In conclusion, sir, we can only worthily praise STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by doing something to carry out the will which he left his children and his country:

"Love and uphold the Constitution of the United States."

I speak it all reverently when I say that this was his religion. He had faith in that