His pure and lofty counsel fell unheeded upon the ears of his near neighbors, and the people of Massachusetts did not listen very patiently to lectures on political purity or reform in civil service from New York city.

The large majority was made up of sensible, strong-headed country farmers, rather slow in making up their minds, but making them up always on considerations of what was best for the Commonwealth.

He indignantly rejected it, and declared he would not eat a creature that he loved.

Certainly if he had performed the promise of his boyhood he would have been one of the foremost men in American literature.

Perhaps, taking him all together, the most brilliant man in Harvard in my time was John Felton.

To yield to him was never the way to win his good will.

I am afraid they have of late yielded for a time to one strong temptation and missed an opportunity for still greater glory, that never will come back.

When the treaty was signed, the struggle began between freedom and slavery for the control of this imperial domain.

It is utterly impossible for me to support the Buffalo nomination.

But I cannot see it to be my duty to join in a secession from the Whig Party for the purpose of putting Mr.

The irrepressible conflict had to be fought out.

He would undoubtedly have taken a very high place in the public and official life of his generation if he had found himself in accord with either of the great political parties.

I took a great interest in the founding of the famous Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and I was the first person named in its Act of Incorporation.

Edward Everett preached a sermon when he was twenty-four years old before a large audience in the Representatives Chamber at Washington which was heard with breathless silence.

Self-seeking political adventurers and demagogues have not been slow to take advantage of this feeling for their own purposes.

But their names were wanting from the honorable roll of the men who accomplished them.

There has probably never been a man in our history upon whom so few people looked with indifference.

One of the virtues of General Sheridan was that he knew when to act without orders.

His election as Governor extracted the people from the mire of Know Nothingism.

A complete system of education at the National charge was an essential element of the reconstruction policy.

As it is, the jetties have been of great value and well worth their cost.

But I confess I like to leave on record, if I may, some evidence which will contradict the charge so constantly made by critics near home, that I am a man of intense partisan and personal bitterness.

It will be better for his reputation that the chapter of that history which relates to him shall be written by a historian with a full and clear sense of those faults and infirmities, concealing nothing, and extenuating nothing.

He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave.