And along with the all-controlling love of freedom he possessed a moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from what he pictured to himself as the path of duty.
Hoar describes Sumner's intense moral sensibility and commitment to duty, which guided his actions.
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There has probably never been a man in our history upon whom so few people looked with indifference.
He proceeded to attack, to promote his own ambitions, the fair name and fame of the Commonwealth itself.
Certainly if he had performed the promise of his boyhood he would have been one of the foremost men in American literature.
But, as I have already said, when the time came, he always subordinated his own desire to what he deemed the welfare of the public.
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