triously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing the divine rule and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government or of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. WINTHROP ROB OBERT CHARLES WINTHROP, a noted American orator, and a direct descendant of Governor John Winthrop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 12, 1809, and died there, November 16, 1894. After his graduation from Harvard University he studied law with Daniel Webster, and was admitted to the bar in 1831. He was for several years a member of the State legislature and a member of the lower house of Congress, 1841-50, being speaker of the House during the thirtieth Congress. When Webster became secretary of state in 1850, Winthrop was appointed to fill his unexpired term in the Senate. In 1851 he was Whig candidate for governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated and thereafter declined all political nominations, although he delivered political addresses occasionally. In Congress he proved himself to be an able parliamentary speaker, but he will be longest remembered by his historical addresses, which are as eloquent as they are scholarly, and display a finished, refined style. Among the best of his many orations are those on the laying of the corner-stone of the Washington monument in 1848, the Boston Centennial oration, 1876, and the oration at the Yorktown Centennial in 1881. His published writings comprise "Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions " (1853-67); "Memoir of Nathan Appleton" (1861); "Life and Letters of John Winthrop" (1867); "Washington, Bowdoin, and Franklin" (1876); "Reminiscences of Foreign Travel" (1894). EULOGY OF EDWARD EVERETT DELIVERED IN FANEUIL HALL, JANUARY 19, 1865 HARDLY know, fellow citizens and friends, I hardly know either how to speak or how to be silent here today. I dare not trust myself to any off-hand, impulsive utterance on such a theme. And yet I cannot but feel how poor and how inadequate to the occasion is the best preparation which I am capable of making. I am sincerely and deeply sensible how unfitted I am by emotions which I should in vain attempt to restrain for meeting the expectations and the demands of such an hour or for doing justice to an event which has hardly left a heart unmoved or an eye unmoistened in our whole community. Most gladly would I (6637) 6638 still be permitted to remain a listener only and to indulge a silent but heartfelt sorrow for the loss of so illustrious a fellow citizen and so dear a friend. I have so often been privileged to follow him on these public occasions of every sort that I almost feel at a loss how to proceed without the encouragement of his friendly countenance and the inspiration of his matchless tones. I seem to myself to be still waiting for his ever welcome, ever brilliant lead. I find it all but impossible to realize the fact that we are assembled here in Faneuil Hall at a meeting at which whatever is most eloquent, whatever is most impressive, whatever is most felicitous and most finished, ought justly to be heard, and that Edward Everett is not here with us to say the first, the best, the all-sufficient word. I feel myself impelled to exclaim-and you will all unite with me in the exclamation, "Oh, for the sound of a voice that is hushed, Certainly, my friends, I can find no other words to begin with than those which he himself employed when rising to speak in this hall on the death of that great statesman whose birthday, by a strange but touching coincidence, we are so sadly commemorating to-day by this public tribute to his life-long friend and chosen biographer. "There is but one voice," said Mr. Everett of Daniel Webster, and certainly I may repeat it of himself to-day, "There is but one voice that ever fell upon my ear which could do justice to such an occasion. That voice, alas, we shall hear no more forever." Yes, fellow citizens, as a celebrated Roman historian said of the consummate orator of his own land and age, that to praise him worthily required the eloquence of Cicero himself, so we cannot fail to feel that full justice to the career and character of our American Cicero could only be rendered by the best effort of his own unequalled powers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say of him that he has left behind him no one sufficient to pronounce his eulogy as it should be pronounced; no one who can do for him all that he has done for so many others who have gone before him. But, indeed, my friends, the event which has called us together has occurred too suddenly, too unexpectedly, for any of us to be quite prepared either for attempting or for hear ing any formal account of our departed friend's career or any cold analysis of his public or private character. There must be time for us to recover from the first shock of so overwhelming a loss before his eulogy can be fitly undertaken or calmly listened to. His honored remains are still awaiting those funeral rites in which our whole community will so eagerly and so feelingly unite to-morrow. The very air we are breathing at this moment is still vocal and vibrating with his last public appeal. It seems but an instant since he was with us on this platform pleading the cause of humanity and Christian benevolence in as noble strains as ever fell from human lips. And no one, I think, who had the privilege of hearing that appeal can fail to remember a passage which did not find its way into any of the printed reports, but which made a deep impression on my own heart as I stood on yonder floor a delighted listener to one whom I could never hear too often. It was the passage in which in terms quite unusual for him, and which seemed as if the shadow of coming events were passing over his mind, he spoke of himself as "an old man who had nothing but his lips left for contributing to the public good." Nothing but his lips left! Ah, my friends, what lips those were! If ever since the days of the infant Plato, of whom the story is told, if ever since that age of cunning fable and of deep philosophy with which he was so familiar, the Attic bees have lighted upon any human lips and left their persuasive honey there without a particle of their sting, it must have been on those of our lamented friend. What lips they were! And what have they not accomplished since they were first opened in mature, articulate speech? What worthy topic have they not illustrated? What good and noble cause have they not advocated and adorned? On what occasion of honor to the living or to the dead at what commemoration of the glorious past-in what exigency of the momentous present-have those lips ever been mute? From what call of duty or of friendship, of charity or of patriotism, have they ever been withheld? Turn to those three noble volumes of his works and follow him in that splendid series of orations which they containfrom the earliest at Cambridge, in which he pronounced that thrilling welcome to Lafayette a little more than forty years ago, down to that on the 4th of July, 1858, which he concluded by saying that in the course of nature he should go to his grave before long and he wished no other epitaph to be placed upon it than this: "Through evil report and through good report he loved his whole country." Follow him, I say, in his whole career as unfolded in those noble volumes the best manual of American eloquence-and then take up the record of those other orations and addresses which are still to be included in his collected works, the record of the last few years as it is impressed upon the minds and hearts of every patriot in our land-with all its grand appeals for Mount Vernon and the memory of Washington, for the sufferers of East Tennessee, for the preservation of the Union, for the defence of the country against rebellion and treason, for the support of the national administration agree |