Mr. Deming was received with long continued applause. He said:

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR EXCELLENCY, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY:

FROM the seat of our Republican Empire which, during the last four years and for all coming time, he has preserved from the spoiler by his wisdom and address; through avenues of weeping myriads who have thronged the thoroughfare, all the way from the Potomac to the prairie, to look on his bier, bear his pall, and to scatter on his casket the fragrant offerings of affection; through great commonwealths which, with all the pomp and circumstance of mournful state, have received him on their threshold and attended him, with uncovered heads, and with every oblation of sorrow from border to border; through magnificent cities draped from cornice to basement in all the emblems and wailing with every motto and articulation of woe; to the sighing of the air, over the groaning earth; to the booming of minute gun, to muffled drum and the plaintive burst of martial music; to dirge, anthem and lamentation, ABRAHAM LINCOLN has reached that silent home of all the living, which "buries every error, covers every defect, extinguishes every resentment."

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well,

Treason has done his worst, nor steel nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him further!

With ampler honors, and with more of the symbols and ceremonial of universal love and veneration, than this continent ever paid before to any of her sons, the funeral pageant had scarcely reached the portals of the tomb, before the posthumous tributes of another Hemisphere are borne across the Ocean. The suffering of her eldest born fairly melts into sympathy the estranged heart of our haughty Island Mother, and England mourns, as when Nelson expired in the arms of victory, or as when the gates of her Great Abbey, closed upon the ashes of the greatest of her warriors. The generous Queen draws upon her own inconsolable domestic grief, for consolation to a wife and mother, like herself bereaved, and pens with her own royal hand a letter of condolence. The brazen lips of the impassive Emperor break their grim silence to utter sententious panegyric. From the mountains of Switzerland, which have for centuries broken the waves of oppression, we have free, generous, intelligent homage to a LIBERATOR, whom William Tell would have been proud to recognize as a brother. Ancient cities, which might have wept, when at the base of Pompey's statue

'great Cæsar fell, have, by their representatives, hung in all the trappings of grief the august Hall, wherein they are now legislating for regenerated Italy. The free towns and corporate guilds of Netherlands and Germany, which wrung their charters from Charles the Bold, and rocked European freedom in its cradle, vie with each other in canonizing a child of the people, who leads the Great Republic from darkness and bondage, to light and liberty. The Prussian Chamber of Deputies, receive with enthusiastic applause, the eloquent eulogium of a personal acquaintance of the PRESIDENT, and affirm a most earnest resolution of respect by unanimously rising from their seats, in token of superlative courtesy, and the Lower House of the Austrian Reichsrath which conducts its stately proceedings, according to forms and usages handed down from the Feudal Ages, is as wild and demonstrative, upon the receipt of the sad intelligence, as an Indignation Meeting of Loyal Leagues in Union Square. Indeed, for ABRAHAM LINCOLN one cry of universal regret is raised all over the civilized earth.

It is difficult to descend from the fervor of these first impassioned outbursts of a world wide grief, to cool analysis and historic delineation. And yet that is the task before me. I should violate the proprieties of this occasion, if I indulged in mere rhapsodies,

however grand and well deserved, for I am to present an estimate of character to a Legislative body, and I can not forget that it habitually dwells in the mild atmosphere congenial to deliberation, that it solicits unvarnished statement instead of rhetorical flourish, and records its own judgment in the composed style of fact and argument.

In these days of photographs, it is almost superfluous to paint in speech the portrait of a distinguished man, but as the resources of the language have been exhausted in depreciation of MR. LINCOLN'S person, I am unwilling that he shall pass into history, in any shape, which may repel the enthusiasm due by posterity, to exalted merit and heroic achievement. Let us at all events place on record the image which he really wore that he may not descend the ages according to malicious caricature. MR. LINCOLN'S person was not one to move their applause, to whom an Apollo or an Antinous are the only ideals of physical humanity, or whose undeviating types of manliness are found on the canvas of a Reynolds or a Stuart, but it was not uninteresting for those to contemplate who regard the human form and face, as a veritable record of life's experiences, and to some extent, an index of character. It was not unsuited to one who was born from a rude stock, in a wild forest, and was nurtured and moulded by

constant warfare, with wilderness life, and iron fortune, and frontier hardships. Conceive a tall and gaunt figure, more than six feet in height, not only unencumbered with superfluous flesh, but reduced to the minimum working standard of cord, and sinew, and muscle, strong and indurated by exposure and toil, with legs and arms long and attenuated, but not disproportionately so to the long and attenuated trunk; in posture and carriage not ungraceful, but with the grace of unstudied and careless ease, rather than of cultivated airs and high-bred pretensions. His dress is uniformly of black throughout, and would attract but little attention in a well dressed circle, if it hung less loosely upon him and the ample white shirt collar was not turned over his cravat in the western style. The face that surmounts this figure is half Roman and half Indian, bronzed by climate, furrowed by life struggles, seamed with humor, the head is massive and covered with dark, thick and unmanageable hair, the brow is wide and well developed, the nose large and fleshy, the lips full, cheeks thin, and drawn down in strong corded lines, which, but for the wiry whiskers, would disclose the machinery which moves the broad jaw. The eyes are dark gray, sunk in deep sockets, but bright, soft and beautiful in expression, and sometimes lost and half abstracted, as if their glance