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ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 
 
."-5i..*, i.-^./^ir' 
 
Over against the great career of a judge upon the 
 Bench, I would set for a moment the career within 
 reach of a great lawyer at the Bar — self-respecting, and 
 never servile, wise and conservative in counsel yet 
 courageous in his convictions both as to law and fact, 
 proud of winning his case yet not dismayed by tem- 
 porary defeat, setting store by the books yet setting 
 greater store by the power of original thinking and 
 the luminous unfolding of legal principles which 
 alone give value to the books, sullied by no taint of 
 dishonor yet daring all things else in discharging 
 his duty to his client, — all of us are jvistly proud 
 to follow, eiiani longo intervallo, such an exalted ideal. 
 
 OrvilIvR Dewey Baker. 
 
copy \o. 
 
 2m 
 
 These Addresses and Memorials 
 being intended for private ciren- 
 lation only, but §00 copies are 
 printed ; and the type lias been 
 distributed. 
 
ADDRESSES AND MEMORIALS 
 
 ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 
 
 ( 1 847-1908 ) 
 
 Edited by 
 M A N L E y H . PIKE 
 
 AUGUSTA, MAINE 
 
 THE KENNEBEC JOURNAL 
 1909 
 
3\^ 
 
 n5*i^tr 
 
 90? 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Foreword 
 
 II. Orville Dewey Bakkr 
 
 III. Address on Development Before 
 
 BOWDOIN Al,UMNI 
 
 IV. Garfield Memorial Address 
 
 V. Address at G. A. R. Encampment 
 
 1890 
 
 VI. Memorial Day Address, 1891 
 VII. Blaine Memorial Address 
 VIII. WiswELL Memorial Address 
 IX. Address to the Maine Bar 
 X. John A. PETERS — A Poem . 
 XI. Editorial, Kennebec Journal 
 XII. Editorial, Maine B'armer 
 
 XIII. Editorial, Portland Press 
 
 XIV. Memorial Services 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 21 
 61 
 
 67 
 
 75 
 
 lOI 
 
 109 
 125 
 131 
 
 135 
 139 
 147 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 Orville Baker's oratorical activity extended 
 over so long a period and so wide a range that it 
 has been a matter of surprise to find how few of 
 his speeches were preserved in print or manu- 
 script. Of many of his best and most eloquent 
 addresses not a word remains, save in the mem- 
 ories of his hearers. Some were delivered before 
 private citizens assembled socially, and were, 
 consequently, not reported; while others have 
 perished because they were never fully committed 
 to paper. It was his practice, when considering 
 a speech, to jot down a few notes — sometimes to 
 write out short passages which he wished to 
 make exact expressions of his thought — and then, 
 having learned these by heart, to extemporize 
 the rest of his oration, building it up around 
 this framework as he proceeded. Thus it will 
 be seen that what remains of these notes can 
 convey no idea of the actual address ; and even 
 the notes are few. 
 
 Moreover, a large part of the surviving 
 speeches, being concerned with special subjects, 
 or intended for special audiences, were not 
 adapted to general reading. 
 
 From all these causes it has resulted that 
 but seven of Orville Baker's addresses have 
 been found available for the present purpose ; 
 
and four of these existed only in newspaper 
 reports. Fortunately, however, the grand poem 
 in memory of Chief Justice Peters had been 
 privately printed. It remains an evidence of a 
 lofty poetical power which for some reason the 
 possessor had seldom cared to exercise. 
 
 The remainder of the volume is made up of a 
 study of Orville Baker's character and attain- 
 ments, together with the eulogies and more 
 notable obituaries of his brother lawyers and the 
 press. In the study just mentioned, the descrip- 
 tion of Baker as a student is the contribution of 
 Hon. D. S. Alexander of Buffalo, N. Y. (Bow- 
 doin, '70); ^nd the appreciation of his abilities 
 as a lawyer is by Hon. Herbert M. Heath of 
 Augusta (Bowdoin, '72). 
 
 The editorials appearing in the Kennebec 
 Journal, the Portland Press and the Maine 
 Farmer are understood to be the work of Mr. 
 C. B. Burleigh, Mr. Frederick Fay and Mr. S. C. 
 Manley, respectively. 
 
 M. H. P. 
 Augusta, Maine, January i, 1909. 
 
ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 
 
He was counsel for the Maine Central and Boston 
 & Maine Railroads, Western Union Telegraph 
 Company, American Ice Company, Edwards 
 Manufacturing Company, Hallowell Granite 
 Works, the estate of J. Manchester Haynes and 
 in the extensive timber land litigations of the 
 Coburn heirs. At the time of his death he was 
 President of the Maine Bar Association. 
 
 Mr. Baker was unmarried. His surviving 
 relatives are Frances W. Rice of Rockland, 
 Ellen B. Buck of Atlanta, Ga., Anna S. Ham of 
 Hallowell, Sanford A. Baker of Chicago, Martha 
 B. Dunn of Waterville, Harriet B. Dudley of 
 Augusta, Henry B. Lewis of China, Maine, 
 Delia L. Giddings of Boston, Mass., and Eliza- 
 beth R. Huntington of Norwich, Conn. 
 
In college Orville D. Baker was an ideal 
 student — tall, graceful, handsome, faultlessly 
 dressed, joyous in disposition, and easily the first 
 scholar in his class. As a fraternity man 
 ( D K E ) he was also ideal, being a fine singer, 
 a forceful debater, a brilliant writer, and a most 
 charming, even-tempered companion. He seemed 
 to excel in everything both in and out of doors. 
 He was the finest baseball player, the crack 
 billiardist, the best jumper, the fastest runner, 
 and the most expert at ten pins. In baseball he 
 had the skilfulness of a professional. His posi- 
 tion was first base, and it took a wild ball to 
 escape his long reach. Whatever the pressure 
 he never failed to do his best. In the historic 
 game with the Eons of Portland, when the 
 Bowdoins won the silver ball in the fall of 1 867, 
 he shared first honors with Frank Ring (class of 
 '69), the catcher. Indeed, Baker possessed all 
 the essentials that make up a most popular man 
 in college. He had a clean tongue. He exhib- 
 ited an abundance of the ironical or pungent 
 banter, which characterized his later life, but 
 there was nothing low in his conversation, and he 
 had no enemies. Among the young ladies of 
 Brunswick he was equally a favorite. He danced 
 properly, dropped a graceful compliment with 
 sureness of aim, and never failed to make a 
 chivalrous beau. Yet his attentions were evenly 
 
distributed. He had already entered the incip- 
 ient stage of bachelorhood. 
 
 His relations with the Faculty did not differ 
 from those of other students. They admired 
 his pleasing manners, his unusual brightness and 
 readiness in recitation, and his quickness to com- 
 prehend abstruse propositions, but his obser\^ance 
 of college proprieties did not distinguish him any 
 more than strenuous industry in the beaten paths 
 of academic routine. He was desultory and ex- 
 cursive, roaming at large over the varied heights 
 that tempted his curiosity. Fortunately his 
 great gifts enabled him to get his lessons quickly, 
 giving him much time in the libraries. As the 
 dawn of intelligence lighted the way he gave 
 those assembled at the Fraternity dinner table 
 bewitching visions of the realms thus explored. 
 He anticipated by several years the Andover 
 dispute as to the ultimate fate of those who never 
 heard the saving name of Christ. Nevertheless, 
 he allowed nothing to stand in the way of success 
 in his regular studies. He took all of the then 
 existing prizes — Sophomore and Junior declama- 
 tion, and English composition. He became class 
 orator, a Phi Beta Kappa, and an oration man at 
 Commencement, and in 1871 delivered the Mas- 
 ter's Oration. He was a student to be proud of. 
 He gave character to the College, to his class, 
 and to his fraternity. There was a manly dignity 
 about him that seemed never to be out of sight. 
 
 His splendid address delivered at Commence- 
 ment, 1908 — the fortieth anniversary of his 
 
 8 
 
graduation — recalled his college speeches. His 
 charm was felt the moment he rose. His voice, 
 musical as a flute, yielded without effort the 
 happy inflections suited to the thought, while 
 his love of form kept him insensibly under the 
 influence of the best diction. 
 
 Like all college boys he had his moods. One 
 week it would be a mood of grace ; at another 
 time he would exhibit a sort of bombastic irony, 
 or brilliant, audacious banter, a trifle extravagant 
 perhaps, but full of the love of scholarship. He 
 was largely instrumental in establishing at Bow- 
 doin the " '68 prize" for excellence in composition, 
 the credit for which lies not so much in giving 
 the money as in the fact that a class of young 
 men, on the day of their graduation, showed 
 such a high appreciation of the need of thorough 
 training for public speaking. Baker's idea was 
 that a college man should be able always to 
 express his thoughts clearly and forcibly, and 
 while in college he set a high standard. 
 
 His crisp, pointed, and delightful college essays, 
 could they be assembled, would make a fasci- 
 nating chapter. A pleasant flavor of sarcasm 
 would be found by the side of many passages 
 that breathe the highest eloquence. Perhaps 
 the too constant exercise of irony made some- 
 times a confusion as to whether he was writing 
 or speaking seriously, but he never wittingly 
 trod on a secret corn. He was too humane for 
 that. Besides, he was without base or unpar- 
 donable faults. 
 
But the qualities which made him eminently 
 lovable and winning were his lack of jealousy 
 and the absence of an offensive egotism. In so 
 ardent a nature these are a real mark of superior- 
 ity. Perhaps he might have developed jealousy 
 had a greater than he been in his class or in his 
 fraternity, for the ambitious man is rare who can 
 watch without soreness the success of a rival. 
 But Baker had no rivals. He \\?i^ facile princeps. 
 
 lo 
 
As a lawyer Mr. Baker has left a name and 
 reputation that comes to but few men in any 
 state. He had the best of training. His mind 
 was enriched by the ripe scholarship that came 
 from his four well-spent years at Bowdoin. 
 There he was a close student, his standing pro- 
 phetic of his future ability. Travel and study 
 in Europe broadened his mind early in youth. 
 He fitted for the bar at Harvard Law School, 
 showing even then a masterly grasp of the law 
 as a philosophical science. He came to the Bar 
 in 1872 in partnership with his father, Joseph 
 Baker, then the acknowledged leader of the Bar 
 of Maine. The son grew rapidly, not because of 
 his father's standing but from his own power. 
 He early became known as a trial lawyer. There 
 he was at his best. His rise was rapid and in 
 many respects remarkable. It is unnecessary to 
 recount the many notable cases in which he 
 appeared in this and other states. During the 
 past twenty-five years there have been but few 
 great cases in Maine in which he did not take 
 part. Perhaps the famous Stain and Cromwell 
 case will be the longest remembered. No man 
 in Maine of the present generation excelled him. 
 Leading lawyers have said he had no superiors 
 in New England. 
 
 In direct examination he built the story of the 
 cause with the touch of a novelist. In cross 
 
examination he had his greatest weapon. There 
 his fertility of resource carried his mind along 
 from point to point with a skill pleasing to all 
 but his opponents. In advocacy he was aggres- 
 sive, courageous, logical; and, when the occasion 
 required it, eloquent. But in the Law Court, in 
 battling for new propositions of law, it is no 
 reflection upon his fellow-members of the Bar to 
 say he had no equals. So great was his concep- 
 tion of legal principles, so accurate was his idea 
 of their relations one with another, so finely 
 analytical was the keenness of his logical mind, 
 that in his hands the common law expanded with 
 society and equity took on new shape. He did 
 much for the science he so dearly loved. 
 
 He was never a politician, with little or no 
 ambition for public office. He served his State 
 as attorney general and honored the office. 
 Beyond that, he was content to follow his 
 profession. Still, he was a close student of 
 public affairs, strongly conservative and as firm 
 in his convictions upon public questions as he 
 was aggressive in asserting them. 
 
 He could well be called an orator, a much- 
 abused term in modern times when all talkers are 
 called orators. Graceful in manner, of attractive 
 address, with a pleasing, well modulated voice, 
 he brought to his work all the externals of true 
 oratory. His diction was rich, at times a prose- 
 poem. But word-painter as he was, he never 
 forgot that the real work of an orator is to 
 convince. The juries, judges, legislatures and 
 
audiences that have Hstened to him will all bear 
 witness that he more often convinced than lost. 
 He certainly was an orator, a true orator, of 
 whom his city and his State have been and will 
 be justly proud. 
 
 He won his fame as a scholar, a lawyer, an 
 advocate and an orator, partly by inborn genius, 
 partly by opportunities vigorously grasped, but 
 mainly by untiring industry. His capacity for 
 concentration was a gift. Few men could so 
 readily absorb a new and difficult problem as he. 
 Often apparently whipped in a cause, he would 
 reform his lines and come to the attack with a 
 courage that snatched victory out of the jaws 
 of defeat. When he worked he worked. He 
 believed that work was the price of all success. 
 The royal English that often entranced his 
 hearers was not always born of a night, but 
 was more often the harvest of years of study 
 and of toil. Such men deserve the fame they 
 leave. Orville D. Baker will go down the history 
 of this State as a man great in whatever he 
 undertook in life because he deserved to be 
 great. We know that after death eulogy is apt 
 to take on the garb of fulsomeness. But his 
 rivals said of him living what we now say of him 
 dead. They studied him to measure him. They 
 had to study him to meet him. We but repeat 
 the tributes often given him in the fulness of 
 his strength, tributes from lawyers to lawyer, 
 foes in the court-room, friends outside. 
 
 13 
 
In private life Mr. Baker was as remarkable 
 as in his public activities — partly because of the 
 continued operation of the same faculties which 
 won him success at the bar and on the platform ; 
 and partly in that he revealed a character quite 
 unknown and unrealized by the outside world. 
 The nature of the man was essentially social — 
 there was nothing of the recluse about him. 
 The abounding vigor and mental alertness that 
 made him a great lawyer and orator made him 
 also a delightful talker and charming companion, 
 whether in the ball room, at the dinner table, in 
 his own library, or out of doors. He knew or 
 had known so many and so various people — had 
 been so much a partaker of his time — had ac- 
 quired so wide and deep a knowledge of humanit)' 
 that he could never be nonplussed nor at a loss, 
 in whatever society he might find himself. He 
 met the highest and the wisest on even terms ; 
 but he was just as much at ease with the casual 
 wayfarer encountered on the highway, or the 
 little child who smiled up at him as he passed. 
 He could bear even that hardest of hard tests — 
 all day association with the same persons in the 
 same house — without a single failure of tact or 
 temper, always cheerful, always cheering, always 
 kind and ready to amuse, or to be amused. He 
 was a man who would take as much trouble to 
 entertain another man, quite indifferent to him, 
 
 14 
 
as he would take to please a beautiful girl — 
 and beyond this courtesy does not and can- 
 not go. 
 
 He possessed both wit and humor; he had the 
 skill of quick repartee along with that of good- 
 natured but keenly effective sarcasm, and a 
 peculiarly amusing narrative style, full of queer 
 and unusual turns of thought and quaint origi- 
 nalities of language. To hear some important 
 law case described by him with this light face- 
 tiousness of touch, as if he had found the trying 
 of it — and the winning of it — but the merest 
 pastime, was to have new light upon the careless 
 strength of the strong. 
 
 Mr. Baker read little of general literature dur- 
 ing his later years ; but his mind was so stocked 
 with the results of immense reading in his youth, 
 stored up and held always ready for use in that 
 wonderful memory of his which never forgot and 
 never misrecollected — that he was invariably 
 prepared for any call upon him. He belonged 
 to that small band of American college graduates 
 for whom the best Greek and Latin authors still 
 remain a permanent influence and a living force ; 
 nor can any one who listened to the plea for the 
 classics which he made at Bowdoin last June 
 soon forget either it or him. He was familiar, 
 too, with the best achievements of art, and he 
 had been for years an intelligent and enthusiastic 
 collector of old glass and china, oriental rugs and 
 colonial furniture. He loved music and had 
 heard much of the best of it. 
 
 15 
 
Having to a surprising extent the gift of 
 throwing business off his mind whenever he 
 wished, he could go out from a day of the sever- 
 est kind of office-work, or from a fiercely-fought 
 case in court, to a game of tennis, or a ramble in 
 the fields ; either of which he would enjoy with 
 the single-hearted zest of a child. This precious 
 power he owed very largely to his singular 
 strength of mind and body. Once, after a seven- 
 hour speech, delivered without notes, though full 
 of facts and figures, he was asked if he were not 
 tired. " Yes, tired of standing in one place so 
 long," he answered, quite sincerely. He posi- 
 tively did not feel drains upon his vitality which 
 would have prostrated weaker men. Weights 
 were gossamer to him which were lead to others. 
 
 He constantly showed that almost infallible 
 sign of greatness — the power of being pleased 
 with simple things. He liked to stroll through 
 the woods or along the roads he had known all 
 his life, watching the birds of which he made a 
 special study, observing the shifting effects of 
 light and shade, the color of the sky, the fickle 
 forms of the changing clouds and the scarlet 
 splendors of the sunset. On some rocky hill- 
 top, or under a forest tree he could sit long and 
 happily, talking and looking about him. His 
 interest in flowers and all growing things was a 
 part of this habit of mind. 
 
 He loved animals as few love them ; and he 
 received from them the reward of the loving — 
 love. His fondness for cats, of which he seldom 
 
 i6 
 
had less than seven or eight about the house, 
 used to be a standing jest among his acquain- 
 tances ; and his dogs were his brothers. Wher- 
 ever he went he made all beasts his friends ; and 
 he would boast laughingly that he knew every 
 cat, dog and baby for miles out along certain 
 roads from Augusta. 
 
 For children loved and trusted him, too. 
 There are many of them who will miss the tall, 
 white haired man who petted them and joked 
 them and knew them by their names. 
 
 It was so that he went about his world, 
 cordial and friendly, full of banter and laugh- 
 ter, standing not at all on the dignity none 
 could better assume when it was needed — 
 betraying not at all any consciousness of being, 
 as he was, the intellectual superior of almost 
 every one he met — a jovial giant, joyous as a 
 schoolboy. Yes, as a schoolboy. For this legal 
 athlete, this surpassing advocate, this mighty 
 man of business, kept hidden underneath all his 
 learning, all his culture, all his accumulated 
 immensity of experience, the honest heart of a 
 boy, fond of the things of earth and air and sky 
 and sea as a boy is fond of them, and able to 
 taste, as a boy tastes, the fresh flavors of that 
 evening and that morning which are ever the 
 first day of creation while boyhood lasts. 
 
 Not many knew him thus — but thus those 
 who knew him knew the real, the best Orville 
 Baker ; and, having thus known him, they can 
 
 17 
 
never without a thought of their lost comrade 
 look out at all he used to look at once, but will 
 never look at with them any more. 
 
 i8 
 
ADDRESSES 
 
IS ALL DEVELOPMENT IN NATURE, 
 
 LIFE, MIND, AND SOCIETY, 
 
 RHYTHMIC AND PERIODIC? 
 
 Address before the Aliunni of Bozvdoin College 
 
 A distinguishing characteristic of modern 
 thought has been the growing sense of the uni- 
 versaHty of law. That every phenomenon of 
 nature takes place in obedience to a pre-estab- 
 lished and invariable order, and not at the caprice 
 of a pleased or angry god, is a conception so 
 refined that it fellowships only with a high civili- 
 zation and great powers of analysis. To the 
 ancients the flat earth, the circumfluous ocean 
 and the all embracing air were alike but the 
 dwelling place of mystery, and the sport of 
 antagonistic and unreasoning gods. Earth must 
 be propitiated by gifts lest she refuse her fruits 
 in their seasons, else blight and mildew, drought 
 and storm would bring to nought the labors of 
 the husbandman. By the frown or favor of 
 Neptune the waves roughened or grew calm, and 
 he whipped the winds from their storm-caves to 
 minister to the whims of his malice ; while Juno 
 and Venus, wife and mistress of Jove, embroiled 
 Olympus itself with their strife over the fate of 
 the pious Eneas. 
 
 The moon and stars, as they whirled through 
 
space, were supposed driven by unseen powers, 
 or else as fixed in spheres of solid but trans- 
 parent crystal, turning forever round the sta- 
 tionary earth. When Jove the thunderer knit 
 his brows, the sky wrapped itself with blackness, 
 and with a noise as of chariots and horsemen the 
 storm-spirit walked abroad. Comets blazed 
 across the sky, eclipse ate up the glory of the 
 sun, stars quit their spheres and went out in 
 mid air like candles too quickly snuffed, — all 
 only to portend calamity to the sons of men. 
 The pestilence that walketh in darkness, the war 
 that wasteth at noon day, and the famine that 
 hungereth but is not satisfied, were all visita- 
 tions of a god that waited to be appeased. 
 
 The commonest events of life required the 
 presence, or were explained on the theory of, the 
 supernatural. The rosy Hours unbarred the 
 gates of the morning, Phoebus guided the chariot 
 of day, Hesperus, the love star, foretold the 
 sweet coming of night; Satyrs and Dryads, 
 Nymphs and Sylvan Fauns sported in the woods 
 and beside the waters; Bacchus in person led 
 the revels of the vine}ard, Priapus was god of 
 the orchard and the garden, while every fountain, 
 grove and river had its peculiar deity, and with 
 equal reverence Eneas bore from smoking Troy 
 the aged Anchises and the household gods. 
 Lucina presided over birth; Mars trained the 
 growing youth in arms; Apollo nourished him 
 with poetry and the arts. Mercury gave nimble 
 and persuasive speech ; Diana held up the mirror 
 
of chastity, Minerva proffered the apples of 
 wisdom, Venus wooed to langour and to love; 
 while over all, superior to Jove himself, at the 
 foot of Pluto's ebony throne, sat the solemn 
 sister-Fates with the distaff, the spindle and the 
 shears, spinning in silence and mystery the 
 thread of life ; and death itself must wait till 
 Atropos applied the fatal shears. At death 
 Charon, with his skiff and freight of shadows, 
 waited to ferry the souls across the Styx to the 
 pale realms of the dead, and there, among its 
 unsubstantial and flitting forms, were the legion 
 that attended the living man ; Care and Sorrow 
 and Disease, meagre Want, sullen Remorse, 
 thirsty Fever, scowling Hate and muttering 
 Revenge, Fear that starts at its own voice, and 
 Jealousy making of ''trifles light as air confirma- 
 tions strong as proofs of holy writ." Only after 
 long probation was the vexed shade admitted to 
 the bland air and immortal bloom of the Elysian 
 fields. 
 
 Such was the ancient conception of the 
 universe ; the sky a bewildering mass of lights 
 of differing brilliancy, moved about from place to 
 place as lanterns are carried in the dim heights 
 of a belfry; some constant, some waxing and 
 waning in periods, some at rest, some in motion ; 
 Nature a congeries of disjointed phenomena, 
 coming none knew whence or how, moving none 
 knew whither, intricate, capricious, orderless. 
 The first step towards scientific knowledge was 
 taken when men passed from the anomalies, to 
 
 23 
 
observe the uniformities, of nature. The un- 
 trained mind is moved by the irregularly vast : 
 as the earthquake, the volcano, the comet, the 
 meteor. The trained mind is moved by the 
 regularly vast : as systems of stars held together 
 by the single law of gravitation. 
 
 Phenomena now began to be grouped and 
 classified. Like effects were referred to like 
 causes. Certain sequences of events were ob- 
 served to be invariable, and the number and 
 variety of these were constantly extending. A 
 patient study of nature revealed real harmony 
 underlying apparent discord, and unity in the 
 midst of diversity. Copernicus established the 
 fixity of the earth and the revolution of the sun. 
 Galileo and Tycho Brahe reinforced him by their 
 powerful genius. Kepler discovered the laws of 
 planetary motion. Newton unified the whole by 
 the great principle of gravitation, and astronomy 
 was forever freed from superstition and fixed on 
 the basis of law. H alley proved the parabola of 
 the comets, and those wandering flames were 
 added to the conquests of law. Dalton con- 
 ceived the law of definite, multiple and equiva- 
 lent proportions, and chemistry has since stood 
 side by side with astronomy. The famous 
 vortices of Descartes led the way to Herschel, 
 Kant, La Place and the Nebular Hypothesis. 
 This was the precursor of modern evolution, and 
 then for the first time was conceived the grand 
 possibility of a universe evolved from matter and 
 force by the operation of law, which is but the 
 24 
 
expression of the Divine will. The subjection 
 of one science to law suggested, and made easier, 
 the subjection of the next. If there was a law 
 for the planets, why not for the comets and 
 meteors ? If there could be a universology for 
 the heavens, why not a geology for the earth.'' 
 If the currents of the sea could be tracked and 
 foretold, why not the currents of the air, the 
 wind, weather, storms ? If there was an order 
 of development in rocks and hills why not in 
 plants and trees.' If in the mineral and vegeta- 
 ble, why not in the animal world.? 
 
 Thus knowledge advanced. Nature opened 
 to science as the snow-drop to the sun, and 
 Fetischism and Polytheism were displaced by 
 the conception of a majestic and universal order, 
 creating, fashioning, disposing, upholding all by 
 immutable laws. 
 
 But the empire of law was as yet thought 
 limited to nature. Her forces were constant 
 and inexhaustible. The untold ages that had 
 passed had neither lessened nor augmented the 
 sum total of their energies. Their form shifted, 
 their quantity never. With the same amount of 
 force to work with, nature has ever the same 
 substance, matter, to work on. Above all, 
 nature does no thinking. It has no will, no 
 choice. It does the work of another, and does 
 it according to his law. The stone, the flower 
 have no volition. They have but one thing to 
 do, and they do that till they die. The animal 
 can change its place, and within limits its state. 
 
 25 
 
If uncomfortable in one position it can move. 
 If tired of the sun it seeks the shade ; if hungry 
 it eats; if exhausted, sleeps; if hot, it stands in 
 the brook. But this it does, not from intelligent 
 choice, but overmastering instinct. It sees and 
 hears and feels, but it does not think or choose. 
 The stone is hard, the flower sweet, the tree 
 tapers, the sun shines, the cow grazes, the kitten 
 plays, not because they will to do so, but 
 because they cannot help it. They are in the 
 hands of a master, and have no power to do 
 otherwise. But the region of the unthinking 
 and non-volitioned seemed to mark the natural 
 bounds of law, as mountain chains the bounds 
 of countries. The very nature of law seems 
 thus to circumscribe its own dominion. Like 
 nature, law neither thinks nor spares, and acts 
 by necessity, not from choice. It is hard, relent- 
 less, inexorable as fate. It visits without mercy 
 the consequences of disobedience and wrong 
 doing. It respects no place or person. It 
 punishes neglect of physical law with pain and 
 sickness and death, it does the same with mental 
 and moral law. It shrivels and withers the 
 unused ; it makes of the abused a passion that 
 overmasters. It is, by turns, swift, sure and 
 deadly like the lightning, and slow moving, 
 relentless and awful like a Fate. It considers 
 no motive, it listens to no excuse or apology. 
 It condemns alike those who innocently trans- 
 gress and those who intentionally violate. Past 
 obedience or services are no atonement. Its 
 
 26 
 
ears are stopped, its mouth is dumb, its heart is 
 stone, but it sees with unsleeping eyes, and 
 strikes with remorseless and omnipotent hand. 
 Cold, passionless, omnipresent, unescapable, it 
 preserves by necessity, and crushes with a sneer. 
 It supports innumerable stars that they clash 
 not one with another, but it hurls men from 
 buildings, drags them down precipices, crushes 
 them wdth weights, drowns them in the sea. It 
 sends the gentle wind from heaven, but it lashes 
 the tornado into fury, and puts fangs in the jaws 
 of the pestilence. It packs away sunlight in the 
 chambers of the coal, but lets it out to lap 
 up great cities with conflagration, to leave men 
 homeless and women crying. It tempts the 
 seed with sunshine and dew, but it mildews the 
 wheat and lodges the bladed corn. 
 
 But man stands on a different plane. All 
 things else have been made for him, and to some 
 e.xtent he controls them. He alone has intelli- 
 gent choice. He not only feels and moves, he 
 thinks and wills. He can adapt means to ends. 
 Of two courses of conduct he can choose the 
 one or the other, with reference either to imme- 
 diate or remoter good. He can succumb to 
 instinct or appetite and be a brute, or trample 
 both and be a god. He can live only for the 
 day, like the butterfly, or for eternity like Plato 
 and Apelles. He is fastened to no orbit as are 
 the stars, and limited to no career as is the 
 brute ; he has time to work in, and eternity to 
 work for. Withal he is so capricious as to be a 
 
 27 
 
puzzle to himself. He does today, what he 
 despises tomorrow, and chases with outstretched 
 arms tomorrow the bauble he threw away today, 
 while the truth, which in one age he rejects and 
 persecutes, in the next shines apparent before 
 him, indispensable, like the sun. 
 
 Is it surprising, then, that the acts of this free, 
 volitioned, capricious being should long have 
 been deemed the solitary exception to the law of 
 order. It was reserved for the nineteenth century 
 and for Auguste Comte to conceive and develop 
 the luminous idea that there was a law and regu- 
 lar sequence in the history of opinion and the 
 development of society; and that if man the 
 individual, comparing brief periods of time, 
 seems unstable as water, man the aggregate, 
 comparing longer periods, moves, acts and even 
 thinks in well defined lines of development, the 
 laws of which under a wider induction may some- 
 time be as accurately mapped out as the laws of 
 light, heat or falling bodies. Indeed the seem- 
 ing capriciousness and disorder which marks the 
 ways of man is only a counterpart of that which 
 we have already seen in nature. The cyclone, 
 the earthquake, the avalanche, the plague, are as 
 unaccountable as they are baleful, and smite 
 without plan as without warning. Now they are 
 scattered broadcast over a hemisphere, now 
 heaped in accumulated ruin on a single district ; 
 now separated by wide intervals of prosperity; 
 now trampling one on another like phrenzied 
 men that fiee from falling walls. Thus to the 
 
 28 
 
unphilosophic mind nature spreads out a scene 
 of boundless and unmitigated disorder. Even 
 Stuart Mill in his posthumous Essays on Reli- 
 gion makes this the climax of his terrific arraign- 
 ment of nature. To borrow his words: "Even 
 the love of order which is thought to be a 
 following of the ways of nature is in fact a 
 contradiction of them. All which people are 
 accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' and its con- 
 sequences is precisely a counterpart of nature's 
 ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are 
 overmatched in injustice, ruin and death by a 
 hurricane and a pestilence." That this is the 
 surface view few will deny, and it is only when 
 deeply considered that nature offers the specta- 
 cle we have contemplated, of a universe set in 
 order. 
 
 If then the anarchy of nature resolved itself 
 into law, and all its discord was "harmony not 
 understood," why might it not be the same with 
 mind. Thus Comte, applying his brilliant and 
 philosophic genius to the history of the human 
 mind, read there an orderly progress and growth, 
 from the day when it first groped after a wider 
 knowledge, an infant crying in the night, till 
 now, when it plays unabashed with the Titian 
 forces of nature, and knocks loudly at the doors 
 of the Infinite. 
 
 Herein lay the greatness of Comte as a 
 thinker, that he saw clearly the fact of such a 
 progress, not that he mapped out its true order 
 of development. To bind together this and all 
 
 29 
 
other development, physical, mental, social and 
 cosmical, into the sheaf of evolution and then to 
 track and more nearly formulate its laws, was 
 reserved for the encyclopedic knowledge and 
 more universal genius of Mr. Spencer. To use 
 the just and fine illustration of a later developer 
 of evolution, Mr. Fiske, "modern philosophy 
 may look to Comte for its Copernicus, but to 
 another for its Kepler and Newton." 
 
 A notion rapidly took shape that this progress, 
 whatever it was, and whether towards better or 
 worse, was at least uniform and uninterrupted. 
 Some few read in history a uniform retrogres- 
 sion. Vico saw in it a single, vast, ever recurring 
 cycle, like the path of a planet, in which the 
 human mind, having advanced to the extreme 
 verge of its orbit, returns upon itself and begins 
 once more its dreary round ; but by far the 
 greater number saw in the human mind an 
 inherent and necessary tendency towards perfec- 
 tion, which would not be stayed or interrupted, 
 but, with unresting energy, moved towards its 
 goal by constant and solid increments of 
 progress. 
 
 Whatever, then, the goal of progress, the 
 theory of its uninterruptedness has thus be- 
 come firmly fixed, and is probably acted on by 
 the great proportion even of cultivated minds. 
 It will be the business of this discussion to 
 examine the truth of this theory. 
 
 Is all devi'lopjiient, in nature, life, mind, and 
 
 30 
 
society, this constant, or is it rhythmic, recurrent, 
 oscillating, yet progressive ? 
 
 A mountain side, seen from a distance and in 
 front, seems a regular and unbroken slope ; in 
 reality it rises by a thousand fluctuating ascents 
 and descents and discouraging stretches of level. 
 A ship steers for a distant port, but it will be by 
 a series of tackings. Light travels from the sun 
 earthward not in a direct line, but by undula- 
 tions. The advancing tide is made up of waves, 
 each of which advances and recedes with an 
 alternating rhythm of its own, and the highest 
 point touched by one may long mark the limit 
 of advance ; but by and by it will be overlapped, 
 and swept from sight, by a successor; yet all 
 the while, in rest or in advance, the tide is com- 
 ing in. Such is the movement of mind, at once 
 rhythmic and progressive. Vico, indeed, by his 
 famous cyclic theory gave to the mind's develop- 
 ment rhythm, but denied it progress. His 
 rhythm was a swing from nothingness back to 
 nothingness ; not the progressive rhythm of the 
 tide, but the vain rising and sinking of a wave 
 far out at sea. 
 
 The purpose of this examination will be to 
 suggest and briefly illustrate the principle, that 
 the progress of nature, life, mind and society 
 has not been steady and uninterrupted, but by 
 irregular propulsions, with intervals of rest and 
 even retrogression; that it moves not contin- 
 uously but by undulations; that, if direct at all, 
 it is only as an imaginary mean between two 
 
 31 
 
real and ever shifting extremes of oscillation ; 
 that you cannot lay your hand on it at any point 
 indifferently, and find it tremulous with an un- 
 resting advance; that therefore halts or breaks 
 or retrogressions not only do not disprove an 
 inherent tendency towards betterment, but do 
 not even mar its plan, being but phases of a 
 little noted law of mental, as well as physical, 
 movement, viz : progression by rhythmic alter- 
 nations and periods, like the tides. 
 
 We shall examine the evidences of the exist- 
 ence of such a law : 
 
 First : In the analysis of nature and life. 
 
 Second : In the action of the individual mind. 
 
 Third : In the movement of society. 
 
 Spencer's profound thought first generalized 
 into a law of nature the fact that motion 
 never takes place in right lines, but in undu- 
 lations, backward and forward movements, as 
 the sea when moved is thrown into waves ; 
 that all motion has its periodic rise and fall, 
 making up what he aptly calls the Rhythm of 
 Motion, as the harmonic rise and fall of stress 
 and pitch make up the rhythm of verse. 
 
 In nature — to begin with the commonest 
 things — the progress of the year is accomplished 
 not by perpetual summer or winter, nor by a 
 constant progression from heat to cold or cold to 
 heat, but by the ceaseless alternation of one with 
 the other, forming the familiar and proportioned 
 cadence of the seasons. So the advance of time 
 from season to season is by successive undula- 
 
 32 
 
tions of day and night, light and darkness. So 
 a single day, from "morn to noon, from noon to 
 dewy eve" and back again to morning, has a 
 graduated and harmonic rise and fall, like a 
 wave, whose perfect proportion is only unnoticed 
 because familiar. 
 
 So the progress from one season to the ne.xt is 
 not persistent, but intermittent, with stationary 
 days and sudden pushings forward. Summer 
 revives in the brief gold of October, and spring, 
 which today turns away her face, coy like a 
 maiden that is wooed, tomorrow decks herself 
 with apple blossoms and daffodils, and runs to 
 court the summer, like a bride that is wed. So 
 there is not only the rhythmic increase and 
 decrease in the length of the days from Decem- 
 ber to June and from June back to December, 
 but the daily rate of change has a tidal rhythm 
 of its own, the days lengthening or shortening 
 faster and faster as they near the Equinoxes, 
 more and more slowly as they near the Solstices, 
 and halting at June and December almost with- 
 out change. So the great currents of air, which 
 form the circulation of the globe, move to and 
 fro like a mighty pendulum, rising from the 
 torrid regions of the equator, flowing out to 
 either pole through the upper air, then swinging 
 back as an under-current to the equator. The 
 currents of the sea, moving from the equator 
 to the poles overhead, with return flow under- 
 neath from the poles to the equator, obey the 
 same law of slow, unresting rhythm, and the ice- 
 
 33 
 
berg and the ship, left to themselves, go floating 
 opposite ways, for the ship takes the current of 
 the surface, while the iceberg is moved by the 
 great polar underflow. The Gulf Stream curves 
 its eastern arm round the shores of Great Britain 
 and Spain ; its companion of the Pacific does the 
 same for China and Japan, then each returns on 
 itself in a closed and rhythmic circuit, like the 
 path of a star ; while along these vast circuits of 
 rhythm, the air, like the water, is propelled in 
 wave-like undulations. The trees, the tall grass, 
 poppies, corn sway in the wind, the storm has 
 its lulls and its moments of fury, because the 
 force that impels them all is not constant, but 
 intermittent and rhythmic. The rain does not 
 fall all day with a monotone of sound, but beats 
 fiercely, dies down, and swells again. 
 
 The disturbances of nature, like its harmonies, 
 obey the same law of periodicity and rhythm. 
 The fires of the Aurora come in pulsations ; 
 electricity, the earthquake, the volcano propa- 
 gate in shocks, alternating with periods of rest. 
 Thunder comes in recurrent crashes, gathering 
 and recoiling, and each shock is rhythmical in 
 itself with gradual swell and subsidence. 
 
 The famous voyage of the ship " Challenger" 
 revealed many beautiful and striking confirma- 
 tions of this law of rhythm. 
 
 The relative gathering of clouds is found, 
 when studied under a sufficiently long observa- 
 tion, to follow this same law of alternation, 
 exhibiting daily a double periodicity, having its 
 
 34 
 
first maximum in the morning, lasting till shortly- 
 after the sun has risen, followed by a minimum 
 till noon, then rising to a second maximum at 
 about 4 P. M., and dropping to its final minimum 
 from sunset to midnight. 
 
 So there is a similar average undulation in the 
 amount of hourly rainfall, which can be calcu- 
 lated for each differing locality, and which, like 
 the rest, is symmetrical in its wave-like movement 
 from maximum to minimum. At Philadelphia, 
 for instance, 6 P. M. marks the average maxi- 
 mum, and 3 A. M. the average minimum, while 
 at Vienna each summer day shows three distinct 
 maxima and minima. 
 
 The longer alternations of wet and rainless 
 seasons in many climates is familiar, and from 
 observations made by Prof. Draper at the 
 Central Park observatory it seems probable that 
 still slower cycles exist, for different localities, 
 of excess and deficiency in rainfall, cycles requir- 
 ing four or more years for their completion, and 
 each one oscillating with a pulsating progress 
 about an established mean. 
 
 So even the wandering wind, the poet's 
 symbol for the unstable, no longer "bloweth 
 where it listeth," in the sense of being held to 
 no law, but is found to follow a defined and 
 rhythmic wave of velocity, having its minimum 
 in the hours between midnight and four A. M., 
 and then gradually rising with the sun till it 
 finds its maximum of force from midday to two 
 P. M. Not only this, but we find that the 
 
 35 
 
wind's rate of change from rest to violence and 
 back again to rest is not constant, but fluctua- 
 ting, remaining nearly stationary from ten P. M., 
 to nine A. M., and then increasing from nine A. 
 M. to six P. M., sweeping up, and then down, 
 its wave-like course with great rapidity. 
 
 In nearly all climates near seas or large sheets 
 of water, there is, coupled with the previous 
 rhythm of swell and subsidence, a daily periodic- 
 ity even to the direction of the wind, setting in 
 from the sea in the morning, rising in velocity 
 with the sun, dying away towards evening, to be 
 followed by a breeze from the land, which in 
 turn stiffens through the night, and sinks to rest 
 in the morning. 
 
 So thunder-storms have a progressive fre- 
 quency of occurrence at different hours of the 
 day, dependent somewhat on the locality, the 
 average of which marks for each locality its own 
 peculiar and permanent curve of undulation. 
 
 In like manner whirlwinds, water-spouts, tor- 
 nadoes, have a marked rhythm of waxing and 
 waning frequency at different hours, correspond- 
 ing generally with the maxima and minima of 
 temperature, wind-velocity, and thunder-storms, 
 being least in number between ten P. M., and 
 ten A. M., then rapidly increasing, till, between 
 two P. M. and six P. M., occurred almost two- 
 thirds of the one hundred and sixty-two observed. 
 
 It is now known that storms travel in definite 
 paths, and it is a curious fact, the subject of a 
 paper by Prof. Loomis, that the progress or 
 
 36 
 
velocity of a storm path is not uniform through- 
 out the day but advances by paroxysms, having 
 its highest velocity from four o'clock lo eleven 
 at night and reaching its maximum at eight. 
 
 If we pass for a moment from the external, to 
 the internal, movements of nature, as science 
 reveals them to us, to those atomic forces whose 
 incessant and tremendous energies underlie the 
 world of appearance, we are met by the same 
 law. Sound, heat, light, electricity, chemism, 
 the great highways by which matter passes into 
 the cognizance of mind, are all only atomic 
 waves, and differ only in the rapidity of their 
 vibrations. And curious science, prying into the 
 very constitution of matter, resolves it into 
 groups of ultimate atoms, round, indivisible, 
 indestructible, never packed so closely that they 
 are not surrounded by space, approaching and 
 receding, but never touching ; and these atoms 
 swing incessantly backward and forward through 
 infinitesimal orbits, with a motion as perpetual 
 as that of the earth or sun. 
 
 And, passing at a bound from the world of 
 atoms to the world of suns, if we set out among 
 the stars, and journey from system to system? 
 even to those whose dim and far-off suns glimmer 
 feebly into our most powerful telescopes, there 
 is no known sun or planet which does not swing 
 in rhythm, and whose motion does not rhythmi- 
 cally slacken towards the greater axis, and accel- 
 erate towards the lesser axis, of its orbit. 
 
 The brave patience of the German Schwabe, 
 
 37 
 
who, in forty six years missed but a single obser- 
 vation and that through illness, revealed the fact 
 that the much feared eruptions through the solar 
 envelope which we call sun spots, and whose 
 yawning gulfs are hundreds of miles from brink 
 to brink, obey this same law of periodicity ; 
 appear and disappear, wax and wane in frequency, 
 with a fluctuating ebb and flow, which takes 
 slightly over eleven years for its completion. So 
 the magnetic needle is true to the pole only by a 
 series of pendulum-like departures and returns, 
 whose complete circuit requires upwards of two 
 centuries and a half, while, subordinate to these, 
 are minor rhythms of variation from year to year, 
 from season to season, and even from day to day ; 
 and, intermediate between the two, is the v^aria- 
 tion that completes itself each eleven years, and 
 thus curiously coincides with the sun-spot period. 
 Prof. Loomis has shown that the frequency of 
 the auroral light exhibits a true periodicity, fol- 
 lowing closely, though not exactly, the maximum 
 variations of the needle and the activity of the 
 sun spots ; and it is now a familiar truth, as 
 pointed out in the last United States Coast and 
 Geodetic Survey, that the great magnetic storms, 
 which are evidenced by violent and abnormal 
 deflections of the needle, and which sometimes 
 paralyze all telegraphy within wide and separated 
 regions, have a rhythm which again swells and 
 sinks with the mysterious activities of the sun 
 spots; compounded with yearly and even daily 
 tides, which reach their flood between seven and 
 
 38 
 
ten in the morning, and their ebb between two 
 and six in the afternoon. 
 
 If, now, we turn from inorganic to organic 
 matter, we shall find that all life, vegetable and 
 animal, gives striking testimony to this suggested 
 law of tide-like alternation, minute advances and 
 retreats, compounded with the slower rhythm of 
 permanent growth followed by decay and death. 
 Plant life, which Mr. Spencer thought did not 
 exhibit very marked rhythms, will be found, in 
 the light of latest science, most instructive. The 
 life of the plant is a continuous balancing of 
 opposite functions. It is supported solely by the 
 alternate in-breathing of oxygen and out-breath- 
 ing of carbonic acid and water, decomposing and 
 appropriating what it needs, recomposing and 
 exhaling what is waste. So there is the annual 
 rhythm of ascending and descending sap, from 
 the roots out into the branches and leaves and 
 back again to the roots. 
 
 But it is in growth — which is nature's name 
 for progress— that the most perfect type is 
 found of rhythmic law. There is first the familiar 
 rhythm of day and night, the plant's power to 
 assimilate its food being coincident with light 
 and ceasing in darkness. There is yet the still 
 more familiar and slower rhythm resulting from 
 the annual seasons. There is a further and 
 proportioned rhythm depending on temperature, 
 and shifting from hour to hour, each plant having 
 its minimum and maximum degree of heat below 
 and above which it refuses to grow, while be- 
 
 39 
 
tvveen these two extremes, its rate of growth 
 increases up to a third point of temperature, and, 
 beyond that, decreases. 
 
 But the most striking and beautiful of all plant 
 rhythms is this; that, when all conditions are 
 kept the same, the rate of growth is not uniform, 
 but has a proportioned wave of increase and de- 
 decrease, growing slowly at first, then more and 
 more rapidly to amaximum, then again diminishing 
 till it ceases altogether. If a series of rings be made 
 round a growing shoot, after a given time the 
 distance between them, as you pass from the 
 point back, will be found to follow a symmetrical 
 undulation, first of increase, and then of decrease. 
 But this is not all ; while the plant's path of 
 growth is a straight line, it holds that path only 
 as the needle holds the pole, by a series of varia- 
 tions from it, since, if one looks down on the 
 up-growing point, it will be seen either to oscil- 
 late from side to side of its true axis, or to 
 describe a minute spiral about it. 
 
 So that all vegetable life sweeps along a 
 complex and rhythmic orbit of growth, much 
 as a planet moves through the heavens, with 
 fluctuating velocity and distinct recurrence. 
 
 If now we pass from plant life to animal life, 
 the same law of wave-like alternation still pursues 
 us. Not only growth, but life itself, is main- 
 tained by a multiform series of alternations, by 
 alternate rests and pulsations of the heart, con- 
 tractions and expansions of the lungs, successions 
 of wakefulness and sleep, activity and repose. 
 
 40 
 
Food is swallowed by a wave -like constriction, 
 digested by a wave-like action of the stomach, 
 and the waste expelled by a like action of the 
 intestines. The needs of the system are recur- 
 rent and periodic, as for food, drink, exercise, 
 rest. The great life sustaining circulations, like 
 the blood, have their circuit and their return as 
 much as the currents of the ocean or the air, and, 
 like them, are transmitted along their path in 
 pulses or waves. Man's life is a constant battle- 
 ground between contending forces, those that 
 build up and those that destroy, and inch by inch 
 the ground is contested. Every motion, every 
 respiration, every heart-beat, every thought de- 
 mands the prompt supply of new energy to 
 replace it, and no atom of potential force can be 
 taken into the system without being set upon at 
 once by the forces of destruction and dissipated 
 again in growth and motion, activity and thought. 
 Only when there is a daily surplus of vital 
 income over expenditure, does the body grow. 
 The amount of this daily accumulation, after 
 swelling to a maximum, slowly decreases till 
 growth ends; then for a time the constructive 
 and destructive forces hang balanced in fierce 
 fight, till at last victory passes its plume to the 
 destructive, and growth sinks into accelerating 
 decay. 
 
 Thus the life of animals, as of plants, perfect 
 as a star through its ellipse, swings to and fro 
 through the orbit of its growth with a velocity 
 which rhythmically slackens as it nears maturity, 
 
 41 
 
is there poised for a time in rest, and then 
 rhythmically augments till death completes the 
 circuit. But whether in its increase or decrease, 
 this longer rhythm of growth is not simple or 
 constant, but oscillating, and compounded with 
 various lesser rhythms, which may retard, arrest, 
 or even temporarily reverse the current. The 
 whole circulation, and the pulses which are its 
 weather-cock, slackens with rest, quickens with 
 food or exercise. The excessive waste of the 
 day is made good by night and sleep; extraor- 
 dinary exertion of body or mind, conditions of 
 food, drink, climate, drainage, each causes its 
 separate and wave-like fluctuations. The bodily 
 health is always in unstable and vibrating equi- 
 librium, sensitive as a magnetic needle. The 
 distribution of vital forces is never precisely the 
 same one week or one day with another. The 
 athlete, the oarsman, the boxer, the runner know 
 that the body cannot long be kept at the severest 
 pitch of training, neither is it always panoplied 
 alike against danger, disease or death. The 
 springtime of life has its days of winter chill, 
 while even into November steals sometimes a 
 glint of gold from life's vanished summer. 
 
 The minor changes from health to sickness or 
 from sickness back to health are not constant, 
 but waning health has its waves of revival, and 
 returning health its waves of relapse. That 
 disease is essentially rhythmic, with major and 
 minor fluctuations, needs not the telling, to those 
 who remember the illness of Grant, Conkling, 
 42 
 
Sheridan and the Emperor Frederick ; above all, 
 not to that nation of watchers over Garfield's 
 bed, who saw, hoping against hope, the wavelets 
 of returning vigor creep bravely back towards 
 life, knowing that the slipping tide was all the 
 while setting outwards towards death. 
 
 Pain and delirium come in paroxysms, settled 
 madness may have its intervals of sanity, and 
 has always periodic undulations, whether in 
 improvement or decline. Fever sweeps to a 
 climax, and has periodic waves of increase and 
 decrease at night and morning. And, underly- 
 ing plant and animal alike, and breaking in 
 through all these minor rhythms as the deep 
 swing of the sea through voices on the shore, is 
 the great rhythm of life and death, against which 
 no man may stop his ears. 
 
 From the known symmetry of nature's work- 
 ing, we might well expect that so universal a law 
 of development in matter and life would hold 
 also of the individual mind. Indeed, short reflec- 
 tion will teach us that the mind, too, in its needs, 
 development, activities and products, is essen- 
 tially rhythmic, and closely follows the plant and 
 the animal. Like them, it has its central and 
 graduated climax of development and decay, and, 
 like them, it sweeps along its path of growth by 
 rhythmic alternations of tension and repose. 
 Like the body, it cannot be held to its best, but 
 swerves. None of its activities are incessant. 
 Like the bow in light, or the battering ram in 
 ponderous things, after exerting its utmost power 
 
 43 
 
it must be drawn back to gain new. Its mastery 
 of a subject or a problem is, like a battle, by 
 successive shocks of attack and recoil, and, often, 
 on the eve of defeat the supreme charge bril- 
 liantly wins the day. 
 
 Mental emotions, too, are rhythmic. Sorrow 
 shows itself in sobs, and deepest grief never 
 racks the mind with equal, but with recurrent, vio- 
 lence. Sudden or great joy, too, has its wave- 
 like alternations, and often shows itself in short, 
 recurrent rhythm of shout or song or leap or 
 dance. Desires, appetites, impulses — intellectual^ 
 moral and religious — are not constant, but wave- 
 like and periodic. Love steals in through the 
 windows of the soul in gentle undulations, like 
 the lapsing of a brook, grows by recurrent pulsa- 
 tions, and, at times, stirred by the presence, the 
 memory or the fortunes of the loved, sweeps 
 over the soul in mighty waves of tenderness. 
 Ambition, whether it "blows through bronze or 
 breathes through silver," rouses not by constant, 
 but by intermittent inspiration. The soul is not 
 always, or equally, fired by its great enthusiasms. 
 So with the fiercer impulses. The passions ride, 
 Valkyr-like and in gusts, across the soul. Anger 
 blows through it in hot blasts, with proportioned 
 climax and subsidence. Hate, even when directed 
 to an object of fixed repugnance, sometimes 
 slumbers, and again surges across the soul in 
 resistless, yet rhythmic, torrent. 
 
 But not only is the mind rhythmic as a star in 
 its general orbit of growth, but, in its movement 
 
 44 
 
along that orbit, it offers a beautiful parallel to 
 the rhythm of the plant. The mind does not, 
 and cannot, grow by the simultaneous develop- 
 ment of all its faculties, but pushes forward first 
 one faculty and then another, as the plant pushes 
 forward first one side, then another, of its grow- 
 ing stem. There is even a certain natural and 
 harmonious order of development for the differ- 
 ent faculties, childhood for observation, youth 
 for imagination, manhood for reasoning and 
 reflection. But even after the common maturity 
 of all, the alternation of their growth continues 
 by the necessary laws of mind. From the study 
 of human nature in senate or forum, the mind 
 turns naturally to — 
 
 "The love of learning, the sequestered nooks 
 And all the sweet serenity of books." 
 
 In reading, the mind has the same craving for 
 rhythm, which itself is rest ; and, after following 
 the packed thought of Spencer, the philosophy 
 of Mill or Arnold, the sweet seriousness of 
 Fuller, or the sombre eloquence of Hooker or 
 Jeremy Taylor, we turn to drink and drink again 
 of Emerson's universal waters; to see the golden 
 and god-like images of Plato's thought spring 
 from the homely and Silenic sculpture of his 
 dialogue ; to hang on the words of Socrates, till, 
 like Alcibiades, we needs must "stop our ears 
 and flee away as from the Sirens, lest we should 
 sit down beside him and grow old in listening to 
 his talk." 
 
 From these again we turn to the strange 
 
 45 
 
prose-music of Sir Thomas Browne, or the dainty 
 and infinitesimal pomp of Herrick; or, if — 
 
 " Wandering lonely as a cloud, . 
 In vacant or in pensive mood," 
 
 we gaze with Wordsworth on the 
 
 " Host of golden daffodils, 
 
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze ; " 
 
 and let them — 
 
 " Flash upon that inward eye. 
 
 Which is the bliss of solitude, 
 Until our heart with pleasure fills 
 And dances with the daffodils." 
 
 If sad, we turn to the rich melancholy of 
 Lycidas, to — 
 
 " The rathe primrose that forsaken dies," . . . 
 
 "The cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, 
 
 And every flower that sad embroidery wears." 
 
 And, since it has been beautifully said, that 
 "nature always wears the colors of the spirit," 
 we may bid our — 
 
 " Daffodils fill their cups with tears. 
 
 To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." 
 
 If yet differently minded, we may bathe in the 
 celestial beauty of Shelley, till our — 
 
 • • • " Soul is an enchanted boat, 
 
 Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float 
 Upon the silver waves of his sweet singing." 
 
 Or else we may link arms with Tennyson, and 
 go with him to — 
 
 " Read and rhyme in solitary fields. 
 
 The lark above, the nightingale below. 
 And answer them in song." 
 
 46 
 
Or reverting to the poet's poet, we may muse 
 with Hobbinoll on "wasteful hills" and see — 
 
 " Calliope with muses moe, 
 
 Soon as his oaten pipe begins to sound, 
 Their ivory lutes and tambourines forego, 
 
 And, from the fountain where they sat around, 
 Renne after hastely his silver sound." 
 
 Or if books tire as sometime they must, then 
 be a "lover of uncontained and immortal beauty ;" 
 go with Emerson, who fits all great things, to 
 Nature ; to the woods, "those plantations of God, 
 where is perpetual youth, where a decorum and 
 sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, 
 and the guest sees not how he should tire of 
 them in a thousand years!" Study with him 
 the " succession of native plants in the pastures 
 and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by 
 which time tells the summer hours !" 
 
 Turn your face up to the wonderful dome of 
 Day, with its "tent of dropping clouds," to the 
 pavilioned Night where "all the stars make gold 
 of all the air" to the "azure sky, over whose 
 unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive 
 flocks of stormy clouds and leave no wrinkle or 
 stain !" 
 
 Yet even from the infinite inspiration of 
 nature, the mind in time must turn, not from 
 fault or flaw in her, but from the mind's neces- 
 sary craving for the rhythm of change. Each 
 sense and faculty is a vessel which cannot be 
 more than filled without overflowing, and must 
 be emptied before it can be filled again. So, 
 
 47 
 
after protracted exercise or enjoyment in travel, 
 art, literature, the mind overflows, and can hold 
 no more. The most spacious thoughts, the 
 noblest verse, the loftiest ideals of beauty, in 
 nature, music, poetry, art, morals, religion, no 
 longer strike or hold the mind. Thus the mind 
 as a whole refreshes itself by the double rhythm 
 of variety in action and total rest, and each 
 faculty rests while another is active. So that 
 the whole complex movement of mental growth 
 is made up of rhythms, each faculty growing by 
 pendulum-like swings from activity to rest, while 
 the whole mind pushes along a rhythmic orbit of 
 development and decay, by a movement which, 
 like that of the plant stem, by urging on its 
 separate powers successively and not simul- 
 taneously, results in constant and rhythmic 
 oscillation across its true axis of growth. Com- 
 pounded with all these regular rhythms of mental 
 development are lesser and irregular ones, follow- 
 ing bodily health or sickness, mental equanimity 
 or anxiety, excessive use or disuse. Extraor- 
 dinary stimulus, too, a superb occasion, the heat 
 of intense solitary thought, the friction and flash 
 of antagonism, the dazzling fence of debate, the 
 quick thrust and parry of legal controversy, 
 forces the mind, makes it think easily, nimbly, 
 holds it to the point, gives fitting and splendid 
 drapery to its thought, fills it with images, makes 
 it crystalline, imperial. 
 
 Learn in another way the inherent rhythm of 
 mind — through her products — by which alone 
 
 48 
 
she is made known to us. As all the simple 
 underlying emanations from matter, light, heat, 
 electricity, move in waves, so the products of the 
 mind are rhythmic. 
 
 All speech is rhythmic ; accent and stress is 
 what gives the spoken sentence piquancy and 
 power. Every accented word has itself a double 
 rhythm of cadence and stress. Every clause 
 has in it many musical notes. Every sentence 
 moves to its climax by progressive shocks of 
 emphasis, and, in crude or perfect fashion, is 
 built in harmonic proportions. Each sentence is 
 a fleet of merchantmen ready for a tow. Prepo- 
 sitions and conjunctions are hawsers to tie them 
 together, adjectives are but flags to bedeck and 
 draw the eye, but nouns and verbs are heavy 
 with cargo, and in their holds are packed the 
 real riches of thought. These are the electric 
 jars where power is stored, and from them it is 
 transmitted in shocks, rhythmically. 
 
 Music is professedly rhythmic, but an opera, 
 symphony, oratorio, is great as it combines the 
 rhythm of single notes or instruments in propor- 
 tioned cadence. 
 
 Eloquence is electric, like the shock from a 
 battery. The orator in his persuasions, the 
 lawyer or statesman in his argument, is rhythmic. 
 He approaches it from afar, warily, and from 
 common ground with his hearer. He assaults 
 and then withdraws, chooses a new point of 
 attack, gathers strength with each recoil, beats 
 down opposing facts by alternate blows and 
 
 49 
 
rests, hurls at them wave after wave of meta- 
 phor, logic, eloquence, reserves himself always 
 for his climax, at last brings up all his reserves, 
 and storms the citadel. 
 
 Poetry is rhythmic — fine prose no less. 
 Tacitus, in the very first line of his story, fell 
 upon a verse ; and Cicero, declaiming for a poet, 
 found his first sentence a perfect hexameter. 
 In that wonderful book, Lorna Doone, Black- 
 more breaks again and again into unconscious 
 verse. Milton never struck a diviner harmony 
 than do the prose-poems of Sir Thomas Browne. 
 "Give me health and a day," cries Emerson, 
 " and I will make the pomp of emperors ridicu- 
 lous. The dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and 
 moon-rise my Paphos and unimaginable realms 
 of Faerie ; broad noon shall be my England of 
 the senses and the understanding ; the night 
 shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and 
 dreams." What music ever surpassed this in 
 rhythm ! 
 
 If, then rhythm, both in movement and devel- 
 opment, is the law of nature and the individual 
 mind, is it not equally the law of associated 
 mind ; of communities, states, civilizations ; of 
 the unfolding of literature, science and the arts ; 
 of the mighty currents of trade, of the great flow 
 of opinion from age to age ? Like the stars in 
 eternal procession up the sky, or those strange 
 moons of Mars, which pass through all their 
 phases before our eyes and in a single night, so, 
 one by one, the nations of the earth climb their 
 
 50 
 
zenith and decline, in rhythmic path of waxing 
 and retreating splendor. The pomp of Assyria, 
 dark Egypt, with mystery of sphynx and pyra- 
 mid, Greece, with white limbs and unsandaled 
 feet, profiled, like her Parthenon, perfect against 
 the centuries, Rome, mistress of dominion ; 
 states and empires since — Germany, the nurse of 
 learning, England, of philosophy and the senses, 
 America, dowered with the priceless trust of 
 freedom — all have passed, or are passing, through 
 their cycle of development and decay. 
 
 But a nation's progress, whether towards 
 greatness or decline, is not constant, but fluctu- 
 ating ; even in the glorious days of Greece she 
 is brought to straits, when "Leonidas and his 
 three hundred martyrs consumed one day in 
 dying, and the sun and moon came each and 
 looked at them once in the sharp defile of 
 Thermopylae." The same of Rome; Hannibal 
 knocks at her gates in midst of her growing 
 power, while Trajan, Aurelius, Julian break with 
 transient splendor the days of her decline. So, 
 for every nation, Austerlitz leads up to Waterloo, 
 and Jena is avenged by Sedan. 
 
 The story of literature is the development by 
 cycles, by alternations of barrenness and luxuri- 
 ance, by rhythmic recurrence of splendid epochs. 
 
 The age of Chaucer is followed by that of 
 Shakespere, then of Milton, of the Restoration, 
 of Anne. Each period has its central figure, 
 about which all the others cluster, and, to and 
 from that central figure, each has its more or 
 
 51 
 
less rhythmic progress, climax and decline. The 
 tide, which rose high in Wickliffe and Chaucer, 
 gave place to the refluent waves of Skelton, 
 Wyatt and Surrey, then swung back through 
 Spencer and Marlow to Shakespere, and slowly 
 ebbed away through Jonson, Fletcher and 
 Massinger. 
 
 So, too, there is a rhythmic progress in the 
 character of literature, which, in cyclic fashion, 
 repeats itself with different peoples. Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, Euripides typify a transition, which 
 was roughly followed by Corneille, Racine and 
 Victor Hugo, by Shakespere, Massinger and 
 Congreve. In each case — speaking in a broad 
 way — the earliest writer has greater boldness of 
 wing, fire and flow of imagination ; the second 
 draws the gentler passions and has a correcter 
 taste ; the third balances, writes in epigrams, 
 over-refines. 
 
 So each literature has its oscillations peculiar 
 to itself, as the swing from the exuberance of 
 the early Elizabethan, from Marlowe and Shake- 
 spere to the severer harmonies of Milton ; again, 
 at the Restoration, from the licentious wit of 
 Wycherley or Congreve to the elegant reserve of 
 Addison, the formal style and polished epigrams 
 of Pope. 
 
 As with literature, so with the arts, archi- 
 tecture, painting, sculpture. They appear and 
 disappear, wax and wane, in periods. Thus 
 architecture, in its three classic orders, the 
 Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, passes through 
 
 52 
 
essentially the same rhythm of development, 
 from severity to grace and at last over-refine- 
 ment, as in the three leading types of modern 
 architecture, the old Gothic, the Decorated and 
 the Perpendicular, typified in the Cathedral at 
 Durham, the Abbey at Melrose, and in Roslyn 
 Chapel; and this cycle of development will 
 be seen to curiously correspond with that of 
 literature. 
 
 Again, civilization, like the mind, is rhythmic, 
 in that it pushes forward and develops first one 
 set of powers and then another, and hence its 
 progress is ever rhythmically oscillating, like the 
 growing plant, in a complicated spiral about its 
 real axis of development. An age of observa- 
 tion, of patient gathering and noting of facts, is 
 succeeded by an age of reflection, in which facts 
 are compared, analyzed, classified, set in order 
 around principles, and brilliant and profound 
 truths drawn from them. 
 
 So an age of criticism and skepticism follows 
 an age of faith, an age of metaphysics is chased 
 by one of materialism, Kant and Hegel by 
 Comte and Mill. 
 
 The same rhythm holds in special lines of 
 movement. Literature vibrates from luxuriance 
 to purism. Architecture becomes Gothic, en- 
 riches itself more and more, multiplies decoration, 
 throws out flying buttresses, flowers with intri- 
 cate and artistic forms, overloads itself, then 
 turns back to the classical, reproduces the severe 
 types of Greece and Rome, passes to the 
 
 53 
 
Renascence. Music swings from the broad, 
 strong tones of Handel and Bach, to the delicacy 
 of Mendelssohn, the subtle, haunting, many 
 voiced moods of Chopin, the intricate ornamen- 
 tation of Rossini ; then breaks off, and welcomes 
 the severe harmony, the unity, the ennobling 
 and spiritual beauty of Wagner. 
 
 The progress of Science is by successive 
 oscillations from the deductive to the inductive. 
 Aristotle treads on the heels of Plato, and Bacon 
 puts to rout the speculations of the Schoolmen. 
 
 The progress of political opinion in England, 
 France, America, whatever be the names of 
 parties, is by constant and rhythmic vibrations 
 from liberal to conservative, and back again to 
 liberal, with even a tolerable uniformity of 
 period. In our own government, whose type is 
 distinctly planetary, with municipal governments 
 revolving about the state, and both circling 
 around the federal as their center and sun, there 
 is the same balanced rhythm between the oppos- 
 ing forces, centralization and dissolution, as is 
 seen in the solar system, and from period to 
 period there has gone on a constant and shifting 
 oscillation from one extreme towards the other, 
 up to Jackson's time swinging slowly towards 
 enlargement of federal powers, then more and 
 more rapidly towards the doctrine of State 
 rights, till, by the crisis of civil war, the pendu- 
 lum sharply swung the other way; while today 
 in the late decisions of the Supreme Court of the 
 United States, and in the growing public demand 
 
 54 
 
for the right of the State to prohibit the sale of 
 imported Hquor, as part of the local police power, 
 is seen again the beginnings of an opposite 
 movement. 
 
 Religion in all ages has moved along a recur- 
 rent path of excesses to a crisis, ending in 
 reform. Brahminism has yielded to Buddhism, 
 Paganism to Christianity, Romanism to Luther. 
 So, all great moral and religious enthusiasms, as 
 the spread of Mohamedanism, the rise of the 
 crusades, roll in billows over the world. 
 
 The currents of trade, commerce, finance, are 
 distinctively rhythmic. The values of things, of 
 wheat, corn, stocks, have their great periodic 
 undulations, reaching over many years, combined 
 with lesser rhythms of monthly, daily and even 
 hourly variation. The flow of money from the 
 east to the south and west in the fall, and the 
 counterflow of the great staples, corn, cotton, 
 wheat, to the east, have a definite and recurrent 
 path and time. The contending forces of supply 
 and demand are continually disturbing the exist- 
 ing equilibrium of industries, attracting capital 
 and labor to those businesses where consump- 
 tion exceeds production and where prices are 
 high, and, by that very act, crowding the busi- 
 ness thus selected, bringing about an excess of 
 production over consumption, and thus again 
 lowering the price. Great commercial panics 
 have a general periodicity, in England of ten 
 years, in America of twenty ; and their approach 
 is heralded, according to an acute French writer, 
 
 55 
 
by six successive years of sharp demand for 
 money, which in turn indicates over-investment 
 and speculation. 
 
 Nor, holding bravely to our law of rhythm, 
 need we be disheartened, if civilization be not 
 always in the stress and thrill of onset, or, with 
 all drums beating, pressing forward in victorious 
 advance ; for we know that, like the tides, it has 
 its halts and seeming retrogressions. 
 
 Neither aggregate nor individual growth is a 
 ladder of which every round is above the last, 
 but progresses only by fluctuations. The latest 
 speech of the great orator is not always his best ; 
 and the same of the poet, the thinker, the 
 novelist. Yet each is still pursuing the rhyth- 
 mic law of growth, and though the Pickwick 
 Papers were not equalled by Baniaby Riidge 
 and Martin Chnzzleivit, and though Adavi Bede 
 stood unmatched by the Mill on the Floss or 
 Silas Marner, still the greatness of Bleak House 
 and Roniola was yet to come; and by and by, 
 pricked by some great spur, the orator, the poet, 
 the thinker, will mightily overpass all his pre- 
 vious limit of achievement. Two centuries 
 passed after Chaucer before another great name 
 was given to English letters, and yet, by and by, 
 Shakespere followed. Learn patience, then, 
 from Nature, who never is in haste. Think not 
 ever that the best has been. Presently, from 
 the deep places of the sea, one more royal than 
 Shakespere will swing past you, thunderous, 
 
 56 
 
and, far up the shore, will leave his lonely 
 gauntlet, the wonder of coming time ! 
 
 Thus we have imperfectly traced our sug- 
 gested law of rhythm from matter through mind 
 to society. We have seen that all nature, 
 whether in its sweetness or terror, wooing or 
 threatening, beats with unresting rhythm ; that 
 a liquid, struck, moves in waves, a solid, in 
 atomic vibration; that mind and society, wher- 
 ever touched, show themselves by rhythmic 
 products, as ice, smitten, breaks into crystals, or 
 the lark into music at the call of dawn. 
 
 Yet, so the wisest tell us, with the universe, 
 even as with the ephemera, evolution must be 
 followed by dissolution, the rhythm of life by 
 the rhythm of death ; they tell us that the time 
 will come when our earth shall become like the 
 frozen moon, and all things shall be wrapped, 
 not in flame of fire, but in universal and over- 
 coming cold ; that, in consequence, all life shall 
 dwindle and disappear, and man and mind, 
 unfed by the solar ray, shall cease to act or be ; 
 that the universe itself is held together only by 
 the equilibrium of attraction and repulsion; that 
 the increasing resistance of the inter-stellar 
 medium may slowly lessen the velocity of all 
 planetary motion; that the attractive forces, 
 being thus less and less opposed, may gradually 
 gain ascendancy, that planets and satellites, thus 
 brought nearer and nearer to rest, may be left 
 unprotected against the in-drawing of gravita- 
 tion; that moon after moon will be drawn back 
 
 57 
 
into its original planet ; planet after planet into 
 its original sun, till at last all extinct suns and 
 systems that are, are hurled with unimaginable 
 shock upon their common centre, and the whole 
 mass, gasified by the fierce impact, rushes back 
 again to nebula and chaos ! Who then can tell, 
 if the stars must be put out, as the lights of the 
 banquet when the guests are fled, and even the 
 mighty pendulum of Time must at last beat 
 itself still ; who can tell if the universe be not 
 already past high noon, and if the finger of Time 
 be not already flinging backward shadows on the 
 dial of Eternity? 
 
 Well, then, did the poet cry, as he looked out 
 on the world of things : 
 
 " Flow, flow the waves hated, 
 
 Accursed, adored, 
 
 The waves of mutation ; 
 
 No anchorage is. 
 
 Sleep is not, death is not ; 
 
 Who seem to die, live. 
 
 House you were born in, 
 
 Friends of your spring-time, 
 
 Old man and young maid, 
 
 Day's toil and its guerdon, 
 
 They are all vanishing, 
 
 Fleeing like fables, 
 
 Cannot be moored. , . . 
 
 Know, the stars yonder, 
 
 The stars everlasting. 
 
 Are fugitive also, 
 
 And emulate, vaulted, 
 
 The lambent heat-lightning. 
 
 And fire fly's flight." 
 
 58 
 
Amid all this flux of things, where, as 
 Heraclitus held, "all things come into being, 
 and forthwith cease to be," what wonder that 
 the soul of the Oriental finds relief in the 
 philosophy of repose ! God at least, the All in 
 One, is eternal ; and, as in Wagner's great 
 music drama of the Trilogy, through the 
 evasive, aurora-like tremblings of the Fire- 
 Motive, breaks the stately music of the Walhalla, 
 so, through this shifting rhythm of things, 
 sounds Arnold's noble verse — 
 
 " Never the Spirit was born ; the Spirit shall cease to 
 be never ; 
 Never was time it was not ; end and beginning are 
 dreams 
 Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the 
 Spirit forever ; 
 Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the 
 house of it seems." 
 
 59 
 
JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 
 
 Memorial Address, September 2^, 1 88 I 
 
 Mr. President and Fellow Citizens — 
 James Abram Garfield, the President whom we 
 loved and whom the people chose, is dead. That 
 life which we held so dear and had watched so 
 tenderly, that life which stood almost for the 
 country's life, was snuffed out like some brief 
 candle of the night. 
 
 The nation has lost its chief, and today the 
 whole world of business and of pleasure has put 
 its shoes from off its feet, and stands reverently 
 about the grave, holding the inverted torch. 
 The bell, the solemn gun, the shut stores, the 
 draped and mourning dwellings — all the outward 
 trappings of woe only speak and poorly the 
 heaviness of the heart. 
 
 Nor does America mourn alone. From the 
 great governments of Europe, from Emperor 
 and Queen and President and Pope and people, 
 from the great and from the lowly, come noble 
 and touching tributes and sympathy, while the 
 flowers of England's Queen are on the coffin of 
 our dead, and the mute masses of England's 
 people bow with us in a common grief. 
 
 This is no ordinary spectacle. After death, if 
 not before, oblivion claims most of us. 
 
 6i 
 
. . . . " we are as the blast, 
 
 A moment heard and then forever past." 
 
 Says the quaint Sir Thomas Browne: "The 
 greater part must be content to be as though 
 they had not been, to be found in the register of 
 God, not in the record of man." 
 
 To what does Mr. Garfield owe this excep- 
 tional and universal homage.? Is it paid him as 
 the President, as the statesman, or as the man } 
 Our loss is too fresh to admit a cold analysis of 
 his character, or to place him in history with the 
 exactness of criticism. It will be for the best 
 and noblest of the land to clothe his virtues in 
 fitting drapery. Yet we are here not merely to 
 anoint his memory with our tears, but to pluck a 
 lesson, like a flower, to take with us from his 
 grave. 
 
 As a President he was grave, dignified, noble. 
 His advisers, led by a brilliant and distinguished 
 statesman, commanded the confidence of his 
 party and of the country. Through them he 
 preserved dignified and friendly relations with 
 foreign powers, economized the public funds, 
 confirmed the public credit, exposed fraud and 
 reformed abuses. In his brief administration he 
 aimed to be the President of the whole people. 
 Firm without obstinacy, recognizing all factions, 
 attacking no one, but bold to defend whenever a 
 right was attacked, he extorted the respect of 
 his opponents, and won the love of his friends. 
 In Southern policy he gave promise of being 
 conciliatory without being weak, and generous 
 
 62 
 
without ceasing to be just. In person approach- 
 able and kindly, his simple ways and life were 
 not left behind him at the door of the White 
 House, but he brought the man with him to the 
 Presidency, and the people. North and South, 
 Democrat and Republican, believed in him and 
 were content with him. They find no spot in 
 the seamless garment of his fame. 
 
 Yet the people do not mourn today chiefest 
 their President murdered. 
 
 As a statesman he was solid, rather than 
 brilliant ; conservative, rather than bold ; but, 
 above all, true to his convictions and fearless in 
 their advocacy. His intellect was of command- 
 ing order, massive, logical, trained. I need only 
 instance that remarkable series of short and 
 non-political speeches made before his election, 
 to show the comprehensiveness of his grasp, the 
 ripeness of his thought, the variety of his food. 
 In truth "reading maketh a full man," and what 
 he had read he had not merely "tasted," but 
 "chewed and digested." He was emphatically 
 the scholar in politics. He knew 
 
 " The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, 
 And all the sweet serenity of books." 
 
 Not only from the great masterpieces of litera- 
 ture, but from many a wayside and forgotten 
 flower he drew treasures which gave body and 
 richness to his serious sentences. His fondness 
 for the early English authors led him to express 
 his thought simply and strongly in sturdy 
 
 63 
 
Saxon phrase, never ornate, yet not wanting in 
 appropriate and splendid imagery. He used 
 illustration to illumine rather than to adorn. 
 His sentences were massed in close array, and 
 bristled with compact thought. They moved 
 and stood with the solidity of the Saxon foot, 
 rather than the elegance of the Norman horse. 
 
 Yet, great as he was, the people do not mourn 
 today only their statesman dead. 
 
 After all, the lesson that he leaves us is not of 
 Garfield the President or the statesman, but of 
 Garfield the man. In him American citizenship 
 had its perfect and consummate flower. Loyal 
 and generous, he cut a kindness in stone, and 
 wrote a wrong in ashes. Simple, kindly, affec- 
 tionate, true — it is on the grave of the man that 
 we drop our garlands and our tears. 
 
 When Socrates had drunk the hemlock and 
 had walked about a little, and then lay down and 
 death came, and Crito had closed his mouth 
 and eyes — "this," says the loving disciple in his 
 simple and beautiful eulogy — "this was the end 
 of our associate ; a man, as it appears to me, the 
 best of those that we were acquainted with at 
 that time," 
 
 Such a man was revealed to us by the fatal 
 second of July, and the wearing, weary weeks 
 that followed. 
 
 It has been beautifully said that even "in 
 private places and among sordid objects an act 
 of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to 
 itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its 
 
 H 
 
candle." How much more when the doer of the 
 act is the ruler of a people ! So Garfield grandly 
 lived and grandly died, and the whitest blossom 
 on the coffin today is his own modest, Christian 
 character, which struck its roots silently and 
 deeply in the cabin, on the tow-path, in the 
 school and in the college. There he gat hold on 
 the very foundations of power ; and moving thus, 
 what wonder that as he climbed height after 
 height of fame and wrapped himself with glory 
 as with a garment — what wonder that fifty 
 millions of people " followed his steps with the 
 rose and the violet." 
 
 "As a plant upon the earth," says Emerson, 
 "so a man rests upon the bosom of God ; he is 
 nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at 
 his need, inexhaustible power." 
 
 For us, then, the tears. For him there is no 
 need to mourn. For him death is not an end, 
 but a change, not a wall that stops the way, but 
 a door that swings open on a landscape of 
 immortal beauty. 
 
 Thou pure patriot, thou ripe scholar, thou 
 sober statesman, thou gallant friend, crowned at 
 once with the amaranth and the laurel, with 
 death and with immortality, the finger on the 
 lips and the mute emulation of thy virtues are 
 thy best eulogium ! We leave thee pillowed in 
 a nation's arms, not forgetting to utter, ere we 
 go, the thrice-said burial-rite of the ancients : 
 
 Vale, vale, vale, nos te ordine 
 Quo natura permittet, sequemur. 
 
 65 
 
SPEECH AT G. A. R. ENCAMPMENT 
 
 Augusta, February 4, l8go 
 
 Nearly a generation has passed since the war 
 begun, a quarter of a century since its close. 
 Many young men and women, now full grown, 
 are entering on the responsibilities of citizenship, 
 who never lisped the war songs, nor followed 
 the dubious track of battle, whose hearts never 
 rose with victory or sank with disaster. Others 
 there are, who, though too young for service, yet 
 in school or shop, by farm or fireside, hung upon 
 the fate of your arms as Troy might do on 
 Hector's. It is fitting tonight that these and all 
 of us should sit at your feet and listen to the 
 story of the saving of the Republic. 
 
 But to you who were actors, not spectators, 
 who sprang from bench, and work, and study, 
 stirred by the trumpet call of country — whose 
 bed was too often the earth, and whose tent was 
 the approving sky — to you, citizen soldiers of 
 the Grand Army of the Republic, this is indeed 
 a night of glorious reminiscence, when memory 
 winds her awakening horn through forgotten 
 chambers of the soul, and, like the sea shell held 
 to the ear, reproduces with faint and mimic 
 noise the story of a life lived long ago. Under 
 the spell of memory how the old days come 
 back. When upon the air, already charged as 
 
 67 
 
from electric batteries, Sumter came, and the 
 souls of men took fire, their thoughts and lives 
 spread broad and deep, and deeds of inspired 
 courage and passion came easy. Then the cry 
 rang, "To arms!" and as with one mind a great 
 nation weaponed itself for battle; war's stem 
 and stirring music piped on every hand, files and 
 squadrons marched and mustered in each village 
 street; under fluttering banners long farewells 
 were said, and men looked grave as they gazed 
 for the last time on each other's faces, and then 
 turned sternly to the front. Since that stirring 
 time you have nearly swept through the orbit of 
 a generation, and, with fitting rhythm, have 
 swung back tonight to this place whence so 
 many of you set out for the war. Not with full 
 numbers now! for, one by one, they have struck 
 their earthly tents, and marched on to that 
 hither country where the soldier rests from 
 fighting. Year by year on Decoration Day, 
 with our reverent flowers we climb the hillsides 
 where the sleepers now lie so thick that the 
 graves seem almost to grow faster than the 
 flowers which fill our hands. Yet, as once in 
 the toss and flare of battle, so now in solemn 
 peace, year by year you have closed up your 
 thinning ranks and brought tears and flowers for 
 the out-numbering dead. But even you may 
 boast no monopoly of death. Soon or late he 
 makes bedfellow with each of us. In waking 
 and in sleep he shadows us, and comes unbidden, 
 like Banquo even to the feast. If we face him 
 
 68 
 
he still slips behind us, and the fleetest runner 
 may not hope to outrun him. 
 
 I know you will bear with me if we turn for 
 one moment from the memories of war, and, 
 with shoes put off our feet, tread reverently the 
 sacred ground of private grief. Heads which 
 have grown gray in the public service, hearts 
 very near to the soldiers of Maine and of the 
 Nation, this very day are bowed and breaking 
 under a close and double sorrow. Twice within 
 a few brief days has thieving death slipped into 
 their household, and each time stolen jewels. 
 Today for the second time the great Secretary 
 and his noble wife stand uncovered in the 
 presence of their dead ; this time a daughter, 
 whose kindly benefactions to the poor, whose 
 devotion to charity and to the Church spread 
 gladness round her, living, and left many to 
 weep her dead. 
 
 Only a little time before, the mournful music 
 had again sounded, and their elder son had been 
 committed to the unreturning dust. To his 
 father he was all which the tenderness of son- 
 ship implies, at once his right hand and his staff, 
 adviser, companion, friend and confidant. He 
 lived but for his father and to keep from him 
 even the flecks of annoyance. The tale he 
 begun to tell was always interrupted if his father 
 spoke, to be rebegun only when his father had 
 finished. The beautiful thing in it was that he 
 did this not from awe or fear, but from the 
 instinct of respect and love. Between the Secre- 
 
 69 
 
tary and the eager, besetting public he stood, as 
 the breakwater between the harbor and the sea, 
 that in those still inner waters great thoughts, 
 like ships, might ride unvexed. 
 
 He had a rare tact with men and an exquisite 
 deference for women. Wherever he was, he 
 never forgot that he was a gentleman, and his 
 unfailing courtesy flowed, like the air, to all 
 alike, to the child and the gray beard, to the 
 humble and the high. Welcome to and gracing 
 the most polished society, he never forgot that 
 man was born before society, and humanity was 
 broader than culture. His reading was wide 
 and intelligent, his memory stored and respon- 
 sive, his writing graceful and effective. In talk 
 he had his father's fascination, and superadded 
 somewhat of the appealing grace of a woman, 
 calling for sympathy and love. At home he was 
 charming and affectionate, and nothing can fill 
 the widening loss to mother, and sisters, and 
 brothers. Above all he moved through life with 
 a rare gentleness. Though young in years he 
 had almost a woman's thoughtfulness for others, 
 and many an unnoticed deed of kindness will 
 keep his memory green in sorrowing hearts. 
 Soldiers as well as citizens have cause to remem- 
 ber him, for almost the last act of his life, before 
 the fatal sickness overtook him, was to restore 
 to an old soldier, under circumstances familiar to 
 your presiding officer, the meagre pension which 
 his years of service had earned, that he might 
 pass his few remaining years in comparative 
 
 70 
 
comfort. He went for this in person to the 
 Secretary of War, and the latter gracefully wrote 
 him that he had made up his mind to refuse his 
 next request to prove that he was not irresist- 
 ible ; but he granted the boon so unselfishly 
 asked for another. Sweetly must the sun have 
 set on his dying bed, and on its beams he passed 
 into eternal rest. There at the beautiful gates 
 of the Valhalla his worth shall be warrant of his 
 welcome, for he was kind to many, and he died 
 loved of all. He was my friend, and I may not 
 speak of him as I ought. If he had faults they 
 were too few to tell, or only such as endeared 
 him. 
 
 " Hail then and harken from the realms of help ! 
 
 That still, despite the distance and the dark, 
 What was, again may be : some interchange 
 
 Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought. 
 Some benediction anciently thy smile." 
 
 Soldiers of the war, the white blossom of 
 
 sympathy springs easily from the grave, and 
 
 gentleness becomes the hero like a flower. 
 
 Shall we not then tonight suspend for a moment 
 
 our festal wreaths while we send to the bereaved 
 
 this soldier's tribute for the soldier's friend.? 
 
 But you, Veterans of the Blue, whose valor and 
 
 sacrifices have given us this united country for 
 
 which we speak — what shall we say of you ? 
 
 " To say you were welcome were superfluous. 
 To place upon the volume of your deeds, 
 As in a title page, your worth in arms, 
 Were more than you expect, or more than's fit, 
 Since every worth in show commends itself." 
 
 71 
 
Only this : — That whatsoever grateful words 
 or willing hearts may do to welcome you, is 
 yours. Nay, whatsoever else is ours of hospi- 
 tality, or cheer or banquet, we make it yours. 
 Ill fares it with the land you saved when your 
 "worth shall not be warrant of your welcome." 
 Ye are the survivors of what is indeed, the 
 Grand Army of the Republic. Fear not that 
 with increasing years or lessening numbers your 
 welcome shall abate. The great pines of the 
 forest seem the statelier for their fallen fellows 
 whom we miss, and grow in value with lapse of 
 time. And so you wearers of the Blue shall, like 
 the leaves of the Sibyl, but gather glory from 
 your wasting numbers. You have a right to 
 dwell upon your country, for you made it free, 
 and on your own past for you made it glorious. 
 Time was, when the nation stood at the narrow 
 pass between life and death, and called her sons 
 to save her. Maine did not lag behind, but sent 
 forth her sons as the unnumbered pines shake 
 out their needles to the gust. For four long 
 years whenever cloudy heights were to be scaled, 
 or death flashed forth from scabbards, Maine 
 was there. From the opening battles of Bull 
 Run to the passing of swords at Appomattox, 
 the Maine troops held their way. When Grant 
 burst, conquering into Vicksburg, and on the 
 Fourth of July formed his troops in square about 
 the Court-house heights, Maine was there. With 
 Sherman when he sheared through the heart of 
 the rebellion, and marched to the sounding sea, 
 
 72 
 
Maine was there. In the death-swamps about 
 Richmond, in the prisons of Libby and Belle 
 Isle, Maine blood sank and Maine lives wasted ; 
 and at Gettysburg, in the critical moment of the 
 war, when, on their own soil, the battle long 
 hung doubtful, and hope was fast yielding to 
 despair, when charge after charge had failed, and 
 at last the whole fury of the rebellion swept 
 round the heights at Round Top, Maine was 
 there with Chamberlain and Howard, to turn 
 desperate disaster into the ringing cheer of 
 victory ! On that day and those that follow it, 
 the old America, the America of slavery and 
 contested constitution closed its life. And by 
 the Grand Army of the Republic the gates were 
 swung open upon the America of the future, the 
 America of freedom and increasing states and 
 stars, and while with words we welcome you to 
 this scene of reminiscence, in very truth and in 
 a larger sense it is you who welcome us to this 
 great country of the future. 
 
 When the soldier, on guard or picket, begirt 
 with danger and with dark, all night long has 
 outwatched the circling Bear, none know like 
 you how he strains his eyes for the coming of 
 the day, or, weary with the long day's march and 
 fighting, how he longs to let slip his cares into 
 the great peace of night. And yet, not morning, 
 when flushed and jocund it comes on tiptoe over 
 the eastern hills; not night, when she wraps 
 herself about with the glory and gold of the 
 stars, ever ushered in a transition of such 
 
 73 
 
splendor as that which your valor offers the 
 American people. Politically we are free. That 
 taint of slavery is out forever. Forty-two states 
 and stars already cluster on our banners. Ter- 
 ritorially we are varied, fertile, exhaustless. In 
 population and wealth we are moving rapidly 
 forward. Industrially it were hard to set a limit 
 to our possibilities. Sections and climates the 
 most diverse, contribute their products. The 
 North is pouring out its manufactures and its 
 colonies, and the South, which has long lain 
 fallow, has for the first time unlocked the secret 
 of her marvelous resources. Externally there is 
 no foe to vex, while, under the Congress of 
 Nations, our commerce may fast stretch itself to 
 new conquests in the rich regions of our own 
 continent, long shut to us. Our tender sky of 
 literature is slowly filling with constellations. 
 Against the lyre of Tennyson we put the sweet 
 reed-music of Longfellow, while Emerson is 
 already immortal with Bacon and Browning in 
 the Westminster of the skies. To all this you, 
 the living and the dead, are welcoming us. To 
 commemorate this fact, in the person of your 
 distinguished Commander, the pines of Michigan 
 have come nodding to the pines of Maine, and 
 we give them welcome. Those that are gone 
 beckon us forward, and blow inspiration back. 
 May we learn from you, as from them, the 
 lesson of chaste and sober living, of high aims, 
 of the beauty of sincerity, of the infinite gentle- 
 ness of heroism. 
 
 74 
 
MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 
 
 Augusta, May JO, l8gi 
 
 War is essentially revolting. It sacks and 
 burns and kills and from its very nature must 
 do so. It obliterates art, blackens and defaces 
 nature, depopulates and destroys cities. It 
 devours wealth, piles up debt, drinks up the lives 
 of the best and the bravest. It makes light of 
 all the treasures of the past, ravages books, 
 scatters great libraries, stifles literature, diverts 
 the intellectual strength of the nation, from 
 knowledge, to conquest and slaughter. Its very 
 virtues are fierce and animal. That something 
 in all of us which responds to the note of war, 
 which is roused by the trumpet's blare, by 
 waving banners, by the spirit-stirring drum, by 
 the pomp and pride of armies, by the march, 
 by the bivouac, by the battle's light, is, after all, 
 the fierce brute within us, which stirs and 
 growls, and would slip its leash and be appeased 
 with blood. Great wars, therefore, the Persian 
 invasions, the Punic, the Thirty Years' War, the 
 wars of the French Revolution, of the Peninsula, 
 of Franco-Germany, — great battles, Marathon, 
 Agincourt, Hastings, Waterloo, Sadowa, Sedan, 
 — great captains, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne, 
 Gustavus, Marlborough, Wellington, Napoleon, 
 
 75 
 
while they stir the blood, strike and fill the 
 imagination for a space, yet live only in history, 
 and get no enduring hold on after generations, 
 even among their own countrymen. Undertaken 
 either to effect or resist conquest, such wars, 
 once over, the world breathes freer and sets to 
 work to repair their ravages. A brilliant page 
 the more in history, a deed or two of splendid 
 valor worth recounting, another shaft or two to 
 gleam in bronze upon the square, — over against 
 them, blood wasted, homes desolate, treasure 
 spent — that is the end. No hold laid on the 
 deep and enduring things that move the world, 
 nothing done for truth, justice, liberty or the 
 rights of man. Small wonder, then, that no 
 nation seeks to perpetuate but rather to efface 
 the memory of such a war. Call up before you 
 all the great wars of history. What one among 
 them all, is commemorated by a national holiday, 
 by gay regalia or reverent worship.? Yet this 
 America of ours, in its first short century of 
 life has passed through two conflicts only, and 
 each of them is already marked at the hands of 
 63,000,000 people, by national observance, by a 
 day set apart, by business forsaken, by jocund or 
 by reverent rites. Wonderful indeed is this.? 
 And yet more wonderful that it is the sponta- 
 neous doing of the people themselves. No ruler 
 has commanded it, no edict has enforced, yet so 
 peculiarly has it been the people's doing, so a 
 part of the people's life has it become, that 
 perhaps no man, now a listener, could say when 
 
 76 
 
Independence Day was not celebrated, or could 
 fix its almost dateless origin. 
 
 Our second great war closed, and not long 
 after, in that sunnier South-land where our 
 armies trampled their victorious way, and where 
 too many of our glorious dead were left, some 
 Southern women went to mourn their dead. 
 The spring comes earlier there, and they had 
 plucked the first spring flowers to strew the 
 graves they loved, but when that was done, side 
 by side with them, touching each other, even, in 
 their sleeps, lay the undecked Union boys, and 
 with the quick, woman's tenderness, over these, 
 too, the flowers were sprinkled. Our North was 
 touched by the act and by its spirit, and when 
 three years after the saving of the Union, a 
 German private, whose name is lost, wrote to 
 say that in the fatherland his people were wont 
 in the spring to visit the burying grounds and 
 place flowers on the graves of their friends and 
 relatives, and that this might be a fitting way to 
 do honor to the Union dead, that great citizen- 
 soldier, John A. Logan, then commander-in- 
 chief of the Grand Army, promptly designated 
 the first Decoration Day, expressing the hope 
 that it would be kept up from year to year, 
 as long as one survivor of the war remained to 
 honor the memory of his departed comrades. 
 Sleep soft, gallant old hero, and have no fear ! 
 Their country and yours will never forget these 
 glorious dead! A quarter-century has already 
 passed since the order of your commander, and 
 
 77 
 
every year, though your own ranks waste, your 
 solemn ceremonial is kept by growing numbers, 
 and long after the last comrade has gone to join 
 his dead commander, when the last empty sleeve 
 shall have told its story out, and the last blue 
 coat shall have been folded awa}' forever, while 
 you reform your files upon the farther shore, our 
 children's children shall still climb the hillsides, 
 as today, and with reverent and loving hands, 
 shall bring their tears and flowers for these 
 outnumbering dead. This is the Nation's day, 
 and the Nation shall guard it. Let stores be 
 shut, let all noise of machinery be still, that 
 nothing may stand between the people and their 
 festival. Strew your flowers tenderly, proudly 
 as well, let the nation's flag float everywhere, 
 and you yourselves march blithely with the old 
 step to the old tunes — Memorial it is indeed, but 
 festival as well, for this our country was dead 
 and is alive again ! 
 
 Today once more the grateful season has come 
 round, once more with our reverent flowers we 
 have sought God's acres where the sleepers now 
 lie so thick that the graves seem almost to grow 
 faster than the flowers which fill our hands. 
 Once more we have marched and laid our 
 wreaths and gone our ways, and the exceeding 
 and unique beauty of the observance has sunk 
 into our hearts. 
 
 But after all, the question always recurs, why 
 does this nation of peace, alone among peoples, 
 thus celebrate and perpetuate its strifes .? Why 
 
 78 
 
does all the world else forget and America 
 remember ? To what is this deep difference due ? 
 Other wars have been as splendid, other captains 
 perhaps as great, other victories as signal and 
 complete. Other peoples are as grateful as we, 
 are equally struck with bravery, stir as easily to 
 enthusiasm. No mere accidents of time or 
 place or circumstance have drawn this deep 
 division. 
 
 We know at once that this difference must lie 
 in some deep reality. However it may be for a 
 time, great masses of men cannot be permanently 
 held or moved by shows. We know too that it 
 must be something fundamental, something that 
 underlies common things, as the earth underlies 
 all foundations that can be built ; something" too, 
 common to all humanity, like the air; something 
 at once elemental and universal, whose center is 
 in the heart of things, and whose circumference 
 touches every man that lives. No less a thing 
 than this can hold enduring sway; before such 
 a thing, when found, the whole world bows, 
 makes holiday, brings garlands and worship. 
 All acts done in such a cause are enobled. All 
 sharers in such acts do thereby "gentle their 
 condition." 
 
 In nature nothing is common or mean, 
 because each thing contains within it some part 
 of that elemental and native beauty which make 
 the world its slave. Are you a lover of this 
 uncontained and elemental beauty .-' Then walk 
 through the woods, those ''plantations of God 
 
 79 
 
where is perpetual youth, where a decorum and 
 sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and 
 the guest sees not how he should tire of them in 
 a thousand years;" "study the succession of 
 native plants in the pastures and by the road- 
 sides, which makes the silent clock by which 
 time tells the summer hours." Turn your face 
 up to the wonderful dome of day, with its " tent 
 of drooping clouds," to the secret night, pavil- 
 ioned with gold and stars, to the "azure sky, 
 over whose unspotted deeps the winds forever- 
 more drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no 
 wrinkle or stain." 
 
 In all this, indeed, shall bea\ity's infinite grace 
 appease and feed the soul ; but to the attentive 
 mind she dwells no less in meaner objects. It 
 is because of her presence that one never tires 
 of the grey of the rocks, of the green of the grass 
 or the trees. No landscape ever was, in sun or 
 shade, but gave some hint of her immortal grace, 
 and never does she appear to man twice in the 
 same dress. Some part of her has passed into 
 the quiet farm scene, into the cows, the flocks, 
 the waving grain. The "frolic architecture of 
 the snow" and frost speak of her, along brook 
 and river she walks beside us, and the gleam 
 from fountain and from falling waters is hers. 
 The viewless envelope of air becomes blue and 
 beautiful with distance, and with water every- 
 where she makes especial holiday. The wayside 
 weed is as dainty as the rose. In common rock 
 or marble the statue dreams, and waits the 
 
 80 
 
master's hand to wake it into life. Even the 
 stagnant pool, when touched with light, breaks 
 into colors and proclaims its kinship with the 
 rainbow. 
 
 So true is it of nature, everywhere and always, 
 even as the poet says : 
 
 "Thou canst not wave thy staff in air 
 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there 
 
 And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 
 
 The principle of it all is that beauty -^ and the 
 love of it — is one of the great primal realities of 
 the world, one of the deep things on which the 
 world and the spirit of man are built and whatso- 
 ever possesses it becomes royal, and in whatever 
 object we find it we are in ecstasy, and fall down 
 before it and worship it as sovereign. 
 
 So, too, when we pass from nature to man and 
 the events of history, there are certain great 
 primal and perpetual forces which underlie every- 
 thing, which have lived since the world began, 
 and have been working for the betterment of 
 man. Like the great forces of nature, time 
 neither adds to, nor takes from, their strength. 
 They know no waste from use, no increase from 
 exercise. They were from the beginning, and 
 their sum then was the same as it is now. Con- 
 served like force, their manifestations change, 
 their nature and sovereignty never. There is in 
 the affairs of men, a certain moral beauty, 
 fitness, right — call it what you will — making 
 itself manifest to men and to nations as truth, 
 
 8i 
 
justice, freedom. Sometimes as all these and 
 more, and these are the kingly things, these are 
 the things that move men, the only things really 
 worth the having. 
 
 In all times and in all lands, the effort of 
 selfishness, of greed, of corruption, of tyranny, 
 has been to stop the way of these irrestible 
 forces. The pages of history are red with such 
 attempts and sometimes they have seemed to be 
 successful. For generations, nay for centuries, 
 men have shut their eyes and stopped their ears 
 against them, and only here and there, a brave 
 and lonely soul has fed the torch, and passed it 
 on to the after generations, but whenever 
 humanity has once turned its face towards them, 
 they have shown themselves to be God-like, and 
 have filled the souls of men with the divine 
 ecstasy. Once having them, men will never let 
 go their hold upon them, but will give up all else 
 for them, strip themselves of wealth, of home, of 
 friends, to have them ; if need be, they will fight 
 for them, will even die for them, as did they 
 who sleep in our soldiers' cemeteries, and we 
 who live to enjoy what they ha\'e given us, will 
 bless their memory for it forever. 
 
 It is with reference to these great and endur- 
 ing things that the acts of men and nations are 
 to be judged. No act done in their furtherance 
 can remain ignoble, no sharer in that act, how- 
 ever humble, can ever be base or mean, for the 
 stream of this great moral force has poured 
 through him, he has become for the time 
 
 82 
 
co-worker with God himself, and somewhat of 
 the Divine must ever after wrap him round. 
 All that man ever does that is worth the doing, 
 he does by drawing to himself these unseen 
 powers and losing himself in their resistless 
 currents. When he does this, the action be- 
 comes memorable, a strange grace invests him, 
 and he speaks and acts as if inspired by a God. 
 
 So is it with the thinker. Socrates stood for 
 whole days and nights together in one spot, 
 motionless, unheedful of weather, without food, 
 without sleep, communing with himself, listen- 
 ing, as he said, to the voice of the God within. 
 
 Emerson says, "When I watch that flowing 
 river of thought, which out of regions I see not, 
 pours for a season its stream into me, I see that 
 I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised 
 spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire 
 and look up and put myself in the attitude of 
 reception, but from some alien energy the visions 
 come." 
 
 All deep thinking is lonely, rare as well, and 
 the reward of vigils. Feed the soul only with 
 the greatest things, with the sea, with the stars, 
 with the streaming wind, with truth, then be 
 patient and the God will come. 
 
 The life of the religious ascetic, of the hermit 
 in his cave ; of Stylites upon his pillar, is their 
 homage paid to the same great law — a mis- 
 directed effort, by isolation from all little things, 
 to get closer to the great things of earth, the 
 heart of nature and the heart of man. 
 
 83 
 
So the poet may sing sweetly enough on 
 common themes, but it is only when he catches 
 the great undcr-harmonies of nature, gives up 
 his verse and himself to these wonderful world 
 voices, letting them pipe through him, that he 
 becomes indeed the wind-harp of heaven and like 
 
 " Music by the night-wind sent 
 
 Through strings of some sweet instrument," 
 
 his verse arrests us, our very hearts dance to his 
 piping, and we will leave all, forget all, and 
 follow his divine song to the earth's end, 
 
 " Across the hills and far away, 
 
 Beyond their utmost purple rim ; " 
 
 nay, like the fabled Eurydice to whom Orpheus 
 piped, back even from immortality ! 
 
 So of the reformer, whose thought is stirred 
 by the wrongs of his fellow-men, and who goes 
 forth to uproot ancient evils. Invisible forces 
 feed and nourish him, deep and secret springs of 
 power are his, and, weaponed thus, he dares to 
 speak the brave word today, though he face 
 death for it tomorrow. 
 
 " Before the monstrous wrong he sets him down — 
 One man against a stone-walled city of sin. 
 For centuries those walls have been a-building ; 
 Smooth porphyry, they slope and coldly glass 
 The flying storm and wheeling sun. No chink. 
 No crevice lets the thinnest arrow in. 
 He fights alone, and from the cloudy ramparts 
 A thousand evil faces gibe and jeer him. 
 Let him lie down and die ; what is the right, 
 And where is the justice, in a world like this? 
 
Bttt by and by, earth shakes herself impatient ; 
 And down, in one great roar of ruin, crash 
 Watch-tower and citadel and battlements. 
 When the red dust has cleared, the lonely soldier 
 Stands with strange thoughts beneath the friendly 
 stars. ' ' 
 
 So with the orator. It is only in those sub- 
 lime moments when he sets his theme deep in 
 the underflow of the silent world-forces, truth, 
 justice, liberty, that what he says is worth the 
 hearing, and his words move irresistibly. Then 
 only does he forget himself and let his message 
 to men speak through him; all mere rhetoric 
 drops away from him, all tricks to gain applause 
 are justly despised, and then all things do his 
 bidding, all the deep moral forces that were from 
 the beginning, and surge and play unseen about 
 us, stream through the speech like music through 
 the pipe; then, indeed, his utterance is golden, 
 his language becomes picturesque and noble, his 
 gesture fit, his thought crystalline and imperial, 
 his whole speech "lyrical and sweet and univer- 
 sal, like the rising of the wind." 
 
 Such a man the imagination should enrich as 
 if there were no other ; to him memory should 
 open all her cabinets and archives, science all 
 her length and breadth, poetry her splendor and 
 joy, and the august circles of eternal law; and 
 this not because the moral power and splendor 
 of his theme "stooped to him and became his 
 property, but because he rose to it and followed 
 its circuits." 
 
 85 
 
But if all this be true of those who only think 
 or sing or speak things, how much more is it 
 true of the hero who does things ? If it be brave 
 and noble to write or speak for truth, for liberty, 
 for the rights of man, how much more to peril 
 friends, home, family, life itself, for their sweet 
 sake ? It is not the mere act of dying bravely 
 that makes the hero, for that may be done under 
 the hangman's noose, the headsman's axe, but 
 the true hero is baptized by his cause; he is 
 glorious because his cause is glorious. This it is 
 that makes 
 
 "That swift validity in noble veins, 
 
 Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, 
 
 Of being set on flame 
 
 By the pure fire that flies all contact base, 
 
 But wraps its chosen with angelic might, 
 
 These are imperishable gains, 
 
 Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, 
 
 These hold great futures in their lusty reins, 
 
 And certify to earth a new imperial race." 
 
 Such a hero unseen forces gird with power. 
 " Nature bends her lines of grandeur and grace" 
 about him, violets nod to him, the great hills 
 beckon him, the rose is sweet for him, stars 
 shine for him, waters flash and fall for him, and 
 the approving sky seems to throw its whole 
 magnificent arch for him alone. 
 
 Now in all these broad fields of power, there is 
 no man so humble but he can bear his part. I 
 hold that every man has in him certain reserves 
 of greatness which can be drawn on when the 
 
 86 
 
great moment comes. The divine soul which is 
 in all, is also in every part, and can be made to 
 respond to the wise and skilful touch, as music 
 to make its way through the stops of a flute, or 
 as light only is needed to reveal in every work of 
 nature its elemental and related beauty. There 
 is in ev^ery man, as with fine insight the poet 
 has said, 
 
 "A seed of sunshine that doth leaven 
 
 Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars, 
 
 And glorifies our clay 
 With light from fountains elder than the Day ; 
 A conscience more divine than we, 
 A gladness fed with secret tears, 
 A vexing forward-reaching sense, 
 Of some more noble permanence ; 
 
 A light across the sea 
 Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, 
 Still glimmering from the heights of undegenerate 
 years." 
 
 Without the cooperation of the people, no 
 reform, moral or intellectual, was ever possible, 
 and if there were not that divine something in 
 every man which, when reached, recognized and 
 obeyed the behest of a sovereign principle, that 
 cooperation could never have been had. 
 
 But great masses of men, like iron, are slow to 
 heat, and till they have been touched by some 
 elemental flame, cannot be trusted to do the 
 work of steel. Therefore it is, that with nations 
 as with individuals, all the things best worth 
 doing or thinking have been done in supreme 
 and rare periods of moral or intellectual uplifting, 
 
 87 
 
when some great baptismal flame wraps and 
 purifies the nation, making dark things clear, 
 and some great primal principle is seen stamped 
 in blood and fire upon the people's heart. 
 
 Such times come, the souls of men take fire, 
 their thoughts and lives spread broad and deep, 
 and deeds of inspired courage and passion are 
 easy. 
 
 And now we know why it is that while Europe 
 is silent at Sedan and Waterloo, and her wars of 
 conquest are left uncommemorated, yet for our 
 own great War of the Rebellion, each year when 
 the spring comes back, this whole nation of ours 
 keeps holiday, and breaks into unique and uni- 
 versal flower-time to crown our dead who are no 
 more. It is because our war was one of those 
 baptismal times, when man got fast hold on 
 realities, because our soldiers fought and died, 
 not for things that live for a day, but for 
 deep and abiding truths on which the world is 
 built, for justice, for freedom, for the rights of 
 man. Men commemorate and can never forget 
 your deeds, because you harnessed yourselves to 
 those irresistible powers, because those celestial- 
 world voices sang through your sometimes 
 unconscious lute, because something of that 
 elemental surge flowed beneath you and upbore 
 you to necessary triumph. Such moments make 
 all that is worth the having in history one, all 
 the past and all the future are focussed in the 
 one sublime instant, and when the shining 
 deed is done, you have linked yourselves im- 
 
perishably with Thermopylae and Marathon and 
 Runny mede. 
 
 In a world where so much is fugitive, where 
 the poppy of oblivion is so soon sprinkled over 
 even noble names, where all things but come 
 into being, and forthwith cease to be, happy are 
 they, the living and the dead, who have passed 
 through the gateway of imperishable deeds into 
 the secure regions of immortality. 
 
 89 
 
JAMES G. BLAINE 
 Memorial Address, January JO, l8gj 
 
 Four hundred years have just closed since 
 Columbus opened America to the world, and 
 while the eyes of all nations have been turned 
 towards the noble ceremonials of that event, 
 even in the expectant hush between the prelude 
 and the pageant, there have sounded solemn 
 dirges for the dead. While the frosts have yet 
 glittered on our New England homes, Death, 
 which knows no season, has found a time for 
 harvest, and huge and golden grain has fallen 
 beneath his sickle. Before the first month of 
 the new century has closed, a loved and honored 
 member of the Supreme Court of this State, a 
 justice of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, an ex-President of the United States, 
 another jurist from private life, versatile in the 
 law, a picturesque and striking figure among the 
 great generals of the war— all have passed over 
 unto the greater number. 
 
 The Church, too, has been called to mourn 
 her venerable Bishop, in whom all seemly virtues 
 went hand in hand with a pure spirit and a noble 
 eloquence. His consecration, his catholic spirit 
 which outstretched all creeds, has made not the 
 
 91 
 
church alone, but humanity, the better for his 
 living. And now, as if all this would not suffice 
 the greedy Harvester, comes this newest, most 
 personal loss in the death of our neighbor 
 and our friend, the foremost man of all his 
 countrymen! 
 
 It is fitting that in this city, his chosen home, 
 in this church of which he was for more than 
 thirty years a worshipper and a member, this 
 simple burial service should be said, this last 
 loving tribute spoken. 
 
 Forty years ago he came to us from his native 
 state of Pennsylvania, and in that time his 
 growing fame has become the chiefest glory of 
 our city and our State. He was but twenty- 
 three years old when he established his home 
 here in 1853, but those who knew him tell us 
 that he was even then of striking presence. 
 Slender and rather tall, attired in the fashion of 
 the time in blue swallowtail coat with brass 
 buttons, with bold, flashing eye and an eager 
 courage of manner, endowed with an indomitable 
 energy and an iron constitution that scorned 
 fatigue, the seeds of a great future were already 
 there. 
 
 Though his powers of oratory were of later 
 growth, he had even then that alert and rapid 
 mind, that quickness to comprehend, assimilate 
 and reproduce, that irresistible charm of manner 
 and that wonderful memory for facts and faces, 
 which were the foundations on which he built 
 his later fame. 
 
 92 
 
Of his later life we must speak sparingly. 
 This is not the time or the presence to meas- 
 ure coldly his achievements or his intellectual 
 strength. Mr. Blaine was a many-sided man. 
 Dead at the age of sixty-two, when he should 
 have been at the zenith of his powers, he lived 
 not long but much. Life is measured not by 
 years but by achievement, and for nearly twenty 
 years, in office and out of it, his has been the 
 central figure of the Republic ! Throwing him- 
 self earliest into the Fremont campaign of 1856, 
 he stepped upon the stage of American politics 
 at a time when great figures were traversing it, 
 and when the passion of the play was at its 
 height. Webster and Clay and Calhoun had 
 indeed played their parts and gone, but redoubt- 
 able leaders filled their places; for the South, 
 Davis and Toombs and Benjamin; for the North, 
 Sumner and Fessenden and Hale and Lovejoy, 
 Thaddeus Stevens, the great commoner, Crit- 
 tenden, Bingham and Conkling, and between 
 the two, Douglas and Winter Davis, and Chas. 
 Francis Adams. The struggle over "Bleeding 
 Kansas," had already fired the nation's blood, 
 and the giant debate was not far away wherein 
 Abraham Lincoln, as the then unknown cham- 
 pion of freedom, was to cross swords with the 
 renowned Douglas in the eyes of all the land. 
 The nomination of Lincoln, to whose support 
 Mr. Blaine's personal influence brought part of 
 the Maine delegation, his election, the secession 
 of the South, and the inspired era of the war 
 
 93 
 
followed fast on one another's heels. All of 
 these he saw and a part of them he was. 
 
 Thrown thus into times which were them- 
 selves an inspiration, trained under the eye of 
 that masterful leader, Thaddeus Stevens, lis- 
 tening to the fervid eloquence of Hale and 
 Bingham, studying the classic ornateness of 
 Sumner, and the keen thrust and parry of 
 Fessenden, equipped by nature, as he was, with 
 stored and ready resources, small wonder that 
 the youthful statesman (he was but thirty-two 
 when he entered Congress) grew apace in power 
 and effectiveness as a debater. 
 
 Bred first to the art of writing, his power of 
 speech had remained unknown to him till, on 
 his return to Augusta from the convention of 
 1856 which had nominated Fremont, the insis- 
 tence of friends brought him to his feet to make 
 report of the doings of that convention. Sur- 
 prised and embarrassed at first, he advanced to 
 confidence and even fervor at the end. From 
 that time on he threw himself ardently into 
 public debate. On the great questions of slavery 
 he was early matched in the Maine Legislature 
 with the most formidable legal mind then in 
 Maine, Mr. Gould of Thomaston, himself a 
 man of imperious intellect, who asked and gave 
 no quarter in controversy, and Mr. Blaine had 
 come off the admitted victor. 
 
 In debate Mr. Blaine was always a dreaded 
 antagonist, never staying long on the defensive 
 and terrible in attack. Quick to see and expose 
 
 94 
 
the error or fallacy of an opponent, unquench- 
 able in courage, swift and keen in retort, with 
 wit, anecdote, illustration, history ready at call, 
 full of resources and of unexpected turns and 
 flashes which blinded his adversary, the ablest 
 debaters felt the peril of his Damascus edge. 
 
 As an orator in the Senate and upon the 
 platform, Mr. Blaine held and swayed his audi- 
 ence, not so much by the purely intellectual 
 quality of his speech, as by the intense domina- 
 ting personality of the man who spoke. In his 
 extemporaneous speeches one will find no pas- 
 sages which could be singled out, like Webster's, 
 for their incomparable splendor ; he had nothing 
 of the subtle, intellectual quality of Calhoun, 
 nothing of the philosophic sweep of Burke or 
 the elevation of Chatham, nothing of Sumner's 
 learning and ornateness, nothing of Fessenden's 
 passionless logic, little of the eloquence of 
 Pinckney or Winter Davis, but his sentences 
 were terse and strong, put plainly what he 
 wished to say, and transfixed his opponent like a 
 javelin. He seldom used mere graces of style, 
 his speeches show little imagination or that 
 poetic touch which is oftenest allied with elo- 
 quence ; he rarely condensed a whole argument 
 into one luminous metaphor as did Bacon or 
 Emerson, but he put his thought into speech so 
 plain that all should see and carry it away, he 
 overbore the opposing argument with facts, 
 pouring these out sometimes in an impetuous 
 torrent, till the hearer was fascinated, convinced, 
 
 95 
 
compelled by the towering will-power of the 
 man. 
 
 As a parliamentarian Mr. Blaine was unsur- 
 passed, if not unequalled, in America. His 
 presence was commanding, his voice resonant, 
 his temper even. He was eminently courteous 
 and fair, but he ahvays respected the dignity of 
 debate, and when his gavel fell, the most turbu- 
 lent House knew it was under the sway of a 
 master. His decisions were rapid and adhered 
 to, and his instantaneous memory for precedent 
 made it difficult to find him unprepared. 
 
 But whatever rank history may assign to Mr. 
 Blaine as an orator or statesman, in one thing, 
 at least, he towers head and shoulders above all 
 who have ever lived in America, as an inspirer 
 of enthusiasm, as the incomparable leader of 
 men! No American ever attracted so strongly, 
 and kept so long, the loyalty and love of such 
 large masses of his countrymen. It may well be 
 that we shall never see again in these prosaic 
 centuries so much of the mediaeval hero, such a 
 belted knight among men. The people felt 
 instinctively his sagacity to lead, his masterful 
 resources, his intuition for their needs, his 
 knightly courage, and, when he set his lance in 
 rest, they followed him as the men of old might 
 follow Launcelot or Richard, the Lion-Hearted, 
 careless whether to the tourney or the wars. 
 
 Wherever he was, in the Senate or the 
 drawing room, he was the commanding presence, 
 and his overmastering personality laid a spell on 
 
 96 
 
men. In conversation his eye flashed, the whole 
 man kindled and became at once alert and 
 intense. When he spoke, he spoke impetuously, 
 at times imperiously, as a man may who believes 
 what he says, and by the very intensity of his 
 belief overbears opposition. 
 
 The closing years of his life were spent in 
 literature and diplomacy, and, until the distress- 
 ful strokes of fortune smote him so heavily, 
 there is no period in his career so reposeful and 
 yet so fruitful of greatness. Years and the 
 soberness of power had brought him intellectual 
 sweetness, a juster sense of the proportions of 
 things, and something of that rare vision into 
 the future which is statesmanship. To this 
 period belongs his most enduring work. His 
 literary labor is distinguished by its impartiality, 
 by its just judgments of men, by its mag- 
 nanimous tributes to personal and political 
 opponents. His language is always fitly chosen 
 and his style lucid and sonorous. In his eulogy 
 on Garfield he has left us a classic, a very pearl 
 of English, fit to rank with the noblest things of 
 the masters. 
 
 All this while, too, was growing in his mind 
 the great conception of Pan-America, of which 
 reciprocity was but a phase, and by which the 
 future will largely measure his creative work, 
 the conception of binding together through 
 commerce and friendship and mutual respect 
 this whole continent of nations. 
 
 Here is the central thought and fruit of all 
 
 97 
 
Mr. Blaine's life and genius, — his intense Ameri- 
 canism. Others have been as great and perhaps 
 greater than he, in their several lines. Webster 
 was the great expounder of the Constitution, 
 Stevens the great commoner, Patrick Henry 
 the great orator ; Mr. Blaine was something of 
 all these, but he was also something more than 
 all of them — he was and will remain the great 
 American ! 
 
 But it is of Mr. Blaine the neighbor and the 
 friend that we would speak the last loving word. 
 Many-sided and magnanimous, he harbored no 
 revenges, was incapable of malice and loved 
 his friends. As a friend he was kind and 
 sympathetic, he had a tender heart as a husband 
 and father, to the poor his hand was ever open. 
 
 Like all great souls, he loved to drink from 
 nature's imperishable fountains and would not 
 willingly be long away from her and her deep re- 
 freshments. Walks by the streams and through 
 the forests, more often in later years long drives 
 past the changing charm of lake and plain and 
 mountain, were to him an inspiration! In his 
 last years he clung to his summer home by the 
 sea, to which he turned each year with touching 
 wistfulness, that its great waves and its salt, 
 splendid air might bring some touch of healing 
 to his wasted health. 
 
 But in the earlier days, before all memories of 
 Augusta brought him the inexpressible sadness 
 of a broken circle, he loved best to take his pas- 
 sing guest up the familiar hillsides of Augusta, 
 
 98 
 
and point out where, below him, the valley of 
 the Kennebec dreamed its dream of beauty, 
 where the city slept, and the solemn river, and 
 where his old home was, by the State House 
 dome. 
 
 Many an hour and lovingly would he linger by 
 these familiar scenes, and in the old happy days, 
 before thieving Death had slipped so often into 
 his household, when the plain old house, now 
 mute, was filled with merry guests, and wife 
 and cherished sons, now dead, and fair young 
 daughters stood about him, and read or talked 
 beneath the apple trees, it was, indeed, a gracious 
 thing to see, and there was no happier home in 
 all this land. 
 
 But now the latter days have come, when we 
 must take leave of our friend, for he must go 
 hence. Already his day is far spent; morning 
 is over-past, the noon has slipped into the after- 
 noon, and at the age of sixty-two, while his life 
 should yet ride some hours high in the horizon, 
 lo! the shadows gather, the great change is 
 upon him, and painlessly, with one last bitter 
 shudder of the riven tenement. Night takes him 
 into her arms, and wraps him about with the 
 softness and silence of her stars. 
 
 In the beautiful words which he himself spoke 
 over the body of the dead Garfield : " Let us 
 think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning 
 which only the rapt and parting soul may know. 
 Let us believe that in the silence of the receding 
 
 99 
 
world he heard the great waves breaking on a 
 farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted 
 brow the breath of the eternal morning." 
 
 loo 
 
CHIEF JUSTICE WISWELL 
 Memorial Address, June 8, igoy 
 
 May it please the Court : At times we are 
 strikingly reminded that close beside the borders 
 of life, set with all its blooms, flows the river of 
 death into whose forbidding waters no man may 
 step and then return, and no man who has once 
 entered may send answer back from the further 
 shore. When it comes to one who is frail with 
 sickness or weary with the hardships of life, the 
 fingers of death are soft and even welcome. 
 But when it overtakes, as it did here, the strong 
 man in harness, it must give us pause in order 
 that we may cast a glance at the life, at the 
 character, at the career of him who has left us. 
 
 Chief Justice Wiswell passed from us in the 
 full tide of life and honor. It is not here that 
 any just appreciation in detail of his services, 
 his public worth, or even his private character, 
 be said; but we are met here as his associates 
 and friends to place upon his grave the sweet 
 tribute of friendly recognition. Of those nearer 
 qualities and companionships which form so 
 much of the sweeter aspects of life he was full, 
 fruitful, yielding back in generous measure more 
 than he could receive. 
 
 For many years he was my close friend, and 
 
he was the close friend of many upon this Bench 
 and in this auditory. We knew and loved those 
 brave personal qualities which must endear a 
 man to those who come in touch with himi. He 
 had a rare ingenuousness of spirit which added 
 greatly to the charm which all felt in his 
 personality. He was a true man, a sincere man, 
 open, frank, almost like a child in his frankness 
 of feeling and expression, his directness, his 
 sincerity, his simplicity. His simplicity was but 
 the insignia of his greatness. 
 
 In his work at the bar, where he had an 
 extensive though perhaps not a commanding 
 practice, and especially upon the bench, where 
 of course in later years, we knew him best, he 
 had the qualities, many of the qualities of a great 
 judge. I think he was characterized deeply by 
 a love for justice, a passion, innate, unobtrusive, 
 but powerful for justice. And he had a rare 
 faculty for attaining it in the given cause. He 
 had, at the same time the gravest respect for 
 law, and with him I think it may fairly be said it 
 was justice informed by a knowledge of the law, 
 and respect for lawiUumined by justice. 
 
 He had a singularly clear insight into the 
 facts of a cause. He penetrated easily through 
 the entanglements of fact. He saw his way 
 rapidly and clearly to the end and did not 
 hesitate to cleave to the very mark, either in 
 pronouncing the principles of law or in reaching 
 the just end. In his decisions, in his opinions, 
 he made no aim at literary finish. His style 
 
never flamed with the fires of imagination. But 
 he had a power of ahnost crystal statement, of 
 strong, vigorous logic, which enabled him to cut 
 his way through unmeaning technicality down 
 to the deep-lying principles of the cause. 
 
 He himself has perhaps best expressed his 
 own view of the duty of the bench, and held up 
 at the same time, perhaps unconsciously, a clear 
 mirror of his own life and powers in the remarks 
 that he made at the banquet given Chief Justice 
 Peters, where he declared that the true office of 
 the bench was the "search for fundamental truth." 
 True it is, as this court so well illustrates by its 
 own practice, that the search for underlying 
 truth is the highest function possible to any 
 tribunal. And I think it can be justly said, and 
 that the members of the bar of this State and of 
 the bench will concur in the saying, that his 
 conscious effort was a search for the underlying 
 truth ; and when he found it he meant to hold it 
 up and to sustain it against all odds. He did 
 not suffer his mind to be swayed from it by 
 aught else. He minded no popular clamor. He 
 minded not the voices of the majority. He was 
 content to dwell in the serene minority with 
 truth and with the right. And that, may it 
 please the court, in these days, I would suggest 
 is the great and commanding feature of his life 
 work and of his personal character. Aside from 
 its endearing traits, aside from its personal 
 charm, its sweetness, its attractiveness to friends, 
 measured from the intellectual standpoint, I 
 
 103 
 
believe the fearless courage of the man was the 
 one central characteristic about which all else 
 grouped and subordinated itself. 
 
 I heard the other evening an impressive 
 address delivered before a dinner of the bar of 
 New York by the retiring senior justice of the 
 Circuit court of the United States for the 
 district of New York, in which he said with 
 great impressiveness and with great truth, that 
 the final refuge of all rights of property, of all 
 rights of the individual, was in the courts. 
 They alone upbear the protecting shield of the 
 constitution, and encroaching and pernicious 
 legislation will, in the end, run riot, unless they 
 finally interpose this sheltering arm. To their 
 courage in opposing, if the truth requires them 
 to oppose, the feelings of the moment ; to their 
 boldness in asserting the constitutional require- 
 ments and sustaining them, the people look, all 
 men look for the final administration of this 
 government. 
 
 And in these days when it is easy to be brave 
 in the institution of measures that are sure to 
 command the assent of the majority, when so 
 often in public life men shrink from opposing 
 what they fear they will be outnumbered in 
 opposing, the bravery of the chief justice, the 
 dauntlessness with which he hewed to the line 
 as he saw it, is the trait I believe most needed 
 and most lacking in public life. 
 
 He possessed it, he exercised it, and he did so 
 to the end. And in placing before himself as a 
 
 104 
 
lawyer that standard and ideal of the search for 
 underlying truth, he placed himself in accord 
 with that which every man in every calling must 
 obey if he would attain any measure of great- 
 ness. Judicially, it is obvious. It is no less so 
 in other arts, in other professions, in other 
 careers. The man of science is no true scientist 
 if he does not above all else place this search 
 for the underlying truth, rejecting error. The 
 philosopher works skilfully or unskilfully in 
 proportion as both his analyses and his syntheses 
 rest upon and reveal the underlying truth of 
 things. And even the poet, with whatever 
 sprays of fancy he may adorn his thought, fails 
 as a great poet unless his verse is but the pipe 
 through which the fundamental truths of nature 
 and humanity may musically stream. It is only 
 when he opens his verse so that the winds and 
 the sky and the resounding sea may pour 
 through it, even as music through great organ 
 pipes, that he sings in harmony with those 
 underlying forces which make the poem and the 
 poet great. 
 
 In judicial life Judge Wiswell perceived these 
 things and acted on them, and we are here today 
 to do honor to what deserves honor, to that high, 
 commanding hewing to principle and that daunt- 
 less courage which dares support principle 
 against all odds. 
 
 And now, may it please the court, our sorrow- 
 ful duty is ended. We await but the word of 
 
 105 
 
the court, the word of his associates, the final 
 word. I remember in the old Saxon story life 
 was imaged to be the passage of a bird through 
 an old Saxon banquet hall. When the logs 
 were piled high and kindled, and the lords were 
 gathered together round the banquet table, forth 
 from the snows outside, a bird flew through the 
 open door, tarried a moment, and flew away 
 upon the opposite side. Its stay within was 
 pleasant. For the moment it felt not cold or 
 bitter winter weather. But the moment was 
 brief. In the twinkling of an eye it had passed 
 and its passage was from winter to winter. 
 "Such," said the old Saxon bard, "such, O king, 
 is the life of man on earth." But were it per- 
 mitted us to have a wider knowledge and a 
 deeper insight, might it not well be that our 
 passage here was rather from an immortality 
 that had passed through the shadows and 
 unrealities of life into an immortality that is to 
 come.? There is not only exquisite poetry, but 
 deep philosophy in the thought of the poet : 
 
 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." 
 But now today, in this belated spring-time, 
 when the splendor is fast coming to the grass, 
 the freshness to the flower, with hints and 
 bcckonings of immortality all about us, our 
 feeling at the end in the death of our beloved 
 friend, is a deep sense of personal loss. We can 
 only say, at the last, and feci with the great 
 Poet of the Lakes: 
 
 io6 
 
"The rainbow comes and goes, 
 And lovely is the rose ; 
 The moon doth with delight 
 Look round her when the heavens are bare ; 
 Waters on a starry night are beavitiful and fair ; 
 The sunshine is a glorious birth ; 
 But yet I know, where'er I go, 
 That there hath passed away a glory from the 
 earth." 
 
 107 
 
ADDRESS TO THE MAINE BAR 
 
 Delivered at Aiigtista, February I J, igoy 
 
 This is an era of agitation ; and from agitation, 
 though sometimes excessiv^e, progress results. 
 We are here to assist and at the same time to 
 temper by such wisdom and conservatism as we, 
 the members of the Bar of the State of Maine, 
 can bring, the path of that progress, — to see that 
 reaction does not dip too far away from action ; 
 and I think the riiembers of the Bar of this State 
 are deeply conscious that they are the ones who 
 should feel, and keenest feel, the broad fact that 
 there are times when the finest action is to 
 refuse to act. There are times when the highest 
 type of moral courage is a noble abstinence from 
 action, when the easy path is that of restless- 
 ness; and, in times like these, where the only 
 virtues that are praised are the virtues of unrest, 
 I believe it is one of the special functions of the 
 Bar of this State and of all the other states to 
 see to it that a wise self-control should govern 
 their great influence. I am not, therefore, one 
 of those who think that the normal state of 
 society is that of unrest. There are undoubtedly 
 activities which are normal, and which neces- 
 sarily accompany the healthy and growing man, 
 but there is also a morbid activity which is but 
 
 109 
 
the restlessness of disease, or the inflammation 
 of passion, or the easy yielding to those lines 
 which are of least resistance ; and in these days 
 when there are silent revolutions, not one but 
 many, in progress under our very eyes, when the 
 most noted characteristic, perhaps, of the age, 
 of this country at least, is the tendency to 
 supersede all delegated authority, to reject the 
 trained assistance of those representative men, 
 who, if properly chosen may well be thought to 
 stand for the better things and the wider knowl- 
 edge of life — it seems to me, and I would 
 venture to lay that suggestion before the Bar of 
 this State, that our great influence — because in 
 the aggregate it is of tremendous weight — that 
 our great influence should be thrown on the side 
 of a wise reserve. 
 
 Great reserves of power that are stored in the 
 lakes most benefit the land when they are 
 distributed through the rivers and the streams of 
 delegated power. The great central reservoir, 
 that power which ultimately reposes in the 
 people, is to be used with a wise reserve, lest 
 instead of irrigation we get inundation ; and yet, 
 though that be true, and though the forces of 
 reaction sweep from one extreme always to the 
 opposite extreme, it is equally true that we 
 should not retard, but should continually en- 
 deavor to promote true progress. But true 
 progress seldom lies in either extreme, — rather 
 in that even path which takes its way undeterred 
 by fear and regardless of consequences. I am. 
 
therefore, not one of those who place too much 
 faith in the constant necessity of change, either 
 in law or in procedure. But yet that should 
 not prevent us from keeping our minds clear and 
 open to those reforms which do satisfy the 
 reason, — those demands and those requirements 
 and changes which the experience of added years 
 has shown are useful and which open up wider 
 paths for the better doing of those things that 
 ought to be done. 
 
 Now, as I have suggested, there are three 
 things which, to my mind, in addition to the 
 other topics that have been here outlined during 
 the afternoon and evening sessions, — three 
 things, each of which, to my mind, would serve 
 to better the conditions of legal practice, and I 
 will venture to submit to you these three things, 
 because all of them have been founded upon my 
 own personal experience, and that experience, I 
 have no doubt, is by no means peculiar to myself, 
 but is shared with many of the lawyers here 
 present. 
 
 In the first place, under our practice, after 
 verdict, the case goes to the Law Court, either 
 upon exception or upon motion. Whether it 
 goes upon one or the other, the Law Court has 
 power only to set aside the verdict rendered, and 
 order a new trial. 
 
 I would beg the careful consideration of the 
 members of this Association to another state of 
 things which will be found to exist in the neigh- 
 boring state of New Hampshire. Having had 
 
occasion to practice under the procedure of that 
 state (and under its statutes) — and I beHeve 
 in all essential particulars its constitutional pro- 
 visions are the same as ours — I suggest a careful 
 study of the New Hampshire procedure in that 
 particular, and its adoption in the State of 
 Maine. 
 
 The point that I desire to bring to your 
 attention is this : There a motion for a new trial 
 as against the evidence can only be addressed to 
 the presiding judge. I do not for a moment 
 recommend any change in our practice in that 
 respect. But when the case is closed, if, for 
 instance, counsel for the defense believes that the 
 facts, as proved up to that time, make no case in 
 law, then he can move the presiding judge to 
 order a verdict for the defendant. If that 
 motion is denied, he takes his exception, and 
 upon that exception he goes to the Law Court 
 with his whole evidence ; and, after full argument 
 before the Law Court, if the Law Court in its 
 judgment says that there is no case as a matter 
 of law, then on this exception it exercises the 
 power, at its option, not merely to order a new 
 trial by the jury, but, if it sees fit, it directs final 
 judgment for the defendant. 
 
 While I have not had occasion to test the 
 converse of that practice, I fancy that under a 
 proper case the same rule applies to a verdict 
 moved in behalf of the plaintiff. Of course this 
 would not so often occur. 
 
 Now that would accomplish what.? In case 
 
the Court exercises its power, and orders a final 
 judgment, that of course prevents the case from 
 being re-tried when the Supreme law tribunal of 
 the State has finally pronounced upon it, and 
 said that as a matter of law there was no case 
 there. 
 
 I had the impression at the time of this 
 address that the exercise of this power by the 
 Law Court of New Hampshire was based in 
 part, or in whole, upon statute. In order to 
 verify this impression, I have written to one of 
 the leading lawyers of New Hampshire and find 
 that the New Hampshire practice rests but 
 slightly, if at all, upon statute, but has been 
 evolved by the court itself as the logical and 
 necessary result of common law conclusions. 
 
 Such it seems is the understanding of the 
 New Hampshire Bar, and this understanding 
 would appear to receive the sanction of the 
 Court from the reasoning applied in the case of 
 Ordzvay vs. Railroad Company, 69 N. H. 429, 
 where the opinion was rendered by the late 
 Chief Justice Blodgett. 
 
 The line of legal reasoning on which the New 
 Hampshire practice rests is simple, and would 
 seem suiificient. If, when the evidence ends, 
 whether at the close or at the end of the plain- 
 tiff's or of the defendant's testimony, it is found, 
 as matter of law, that there is no legal evidence 
 sufficient to sustain a verdict for the plaintiff, 
 then counsel for the defendant moves that a 
 verdict be directed in the defendant's favor, and 
 
 113 
 
if this motion is denied, he takes his exception 
 to the ruHng of law, and if the Law Court on 
 final argument decide that this motion should 
 have been granted, it simply sustains the excep- 
 tion and at the same time makes good the doing 
 of what should have been done below by ordering 
 final judgment for the defendant. 
 
 In Ordivay vs. Railroad, before cited, the 
 New Hampshire Court thus answers any objec- 
 tion that the practice adopted vv'ould be an 
 encroachment on the constitutional right of jury 
 trial. It says: 
 
 "Nor" (in giving the effect of this method of 
 procedure) "when the facts would not authorize 
 the jury to find a verdict for the plaintiff, or if 
 the court would set it aside if so found as con- 
 trary to evidence, is there to be apprehended any 
 danger of encroachment upon the plaintiff's 
 rights, or abridgement of the prerogatives of the 
 jury. Whether a verdict or non-suit be ordered, 
 no right of the plaintiff is taken from him, if his 
 rights be regarded in their just extent. He 
 cannot rightfully claim a verdict of the jury if he 
 fails to produce evidence which will legally 
 sustain it, and it is only when he does so fail that 
 he is precluded from submitting his case to their 
 consciences; nor is there any violation of the 
 salutary rule (which is nowhere given a more 
 extensive application than in this jurisdiction), 
 that to questions of law the judges are to 
 respond, and to questions of fact, the jury, 
 because it is purely a question of law whether, 
 
 114 
 
upon a given state of facts, the plaintiff is 
 entitled to recover." 
 
 At the same time, the New Hampshire Court, 
 in its discretion, may and does direct a new trial 
 by the jury if it deems that justice so requires. 
 
 The only statute in New Hampshire which 
 seems to bear upon the subject, as I am advised, 
 is the following, found in Public Statutes of New 
 Hampshire, chap. 204, sec. 15 : 
 
 " Upon the determination of the questions 
 arising upon a bill of exceptions or case reserved, 
 such judgment shall be rendered or order made 
 at the law term as the case requires ; and if 
 judgment has been rendered in the case it may 
 be vacated as if rendered by mistake, and such 
 further proceedings may be had therein as to 
 law and justice appertain." 
 
 It will probably be found, on examination of 
 our own statutes, that power equally effective, so 
 far as statutes went, has been conferred upon 
 our own Court. If not, a simple change of 
 statute would effect it. 
 
 The reform advocated here would seem, there- 
 fore, to be in the hands of the Court itself. 
 There would seem to be no legal or constitu- 
 tional objection to the adoption of this procedure 
 by the Law Court of this State, while its 
 importance seems to be urged by the logic of 
 common law and as the only means of giving full 
 effect and authority to the deliberate determina- 
 tion of the Law Court. 
 
 Now, under our practice, our Law Court not 
 
 115 
 
exercising that power which it does exercise in 
 New Hampshire, in one case where I myself was 
 personally engaged, — and I use this merely as an 
 illustration — the case came back and was tried 
 before four different juries, and each time on 
 motion the case was again taken to the Law 
 Court with the same result, "Verdict set aside; 
 new trial granted," until finally at the fourth 
 trial before a jury the presiding justice ordered a 
 verdict for the defendant in accordance with the 
 opinion of the full court in the same case 
 delivered at the three trials previous. 
 
 Mr. S. S. Brown of Waterville: You say 
 that was in this State .-' 
 
 President Baker: That was in this State 
 and in this county. 
 
 Now, to my mind, the question of reform in 
 judicial or legal procedure is based upon this 
 principle : That parties should have all unneces- 
 sary expense spared them. There was an 
 expense that was not only unnecessary, but, as 
 all unnecessary things are, wasteful. The final 
 result was the same as if final judgment for the 
 defendant had been directed by the Law Court 
 in the first instance, as would have been done, 
 undoubtedly, under the New Hampshire prac- 
 tice; — but yet both parties, plaintiff as well as 
 defendant, were put to the great and needless 
 expense of four jury trials and three arguments 
 in the Law Court before that final judgment was 
 reached, or could be reached under our statute. 
 I commend to the consideration of this Associa- 
 
 ii6 
 
tion the study and respectful recommendation 
 to the Bench of the New Hampshire plan. 
 
 The second thing, which I also discovered, as 
 one usually does, by personal experience, — in the 
 United States Courts, after a final decision is 
 rendered by the Court of Appeals, whatever that 
 may be, that decision, although fresh from the 
 pen of the Bench, must be held in abeyance for 
 a certain specific time — I believe under the 
 United States practice it is thirty days — during 
 which time it is open to counsel on either side 
 who may feel aggrieved by the decision to 
 reconsider and reverse its own finding. 
 
 Now of course in the ordinary case that is 
 absolutely useless, because, after the Court has 
 maturely considered the case and reached the 
 result which it desired to reach, it would abide 
 by that result. It is not for the ordinary case, 
 but for the extraordinary case that that ambula- 
 tory decision is provided, because in some cases 
 the Court may have inadvertently fallen into 
 error. It may be an error of law, even of funda- 
 mental law, and such an error as when brought 
 to the attention of the Court will at once and 
 necessarily be rectified, and the result reversed 
 or modified. The same practice prevails in 
 many of the states. To my knowledge, it does 
 in New Hampshire, and I have the impression 
 it does in Massachusetts. 
 
 Now I have this case in mind, where a decision 
 had been rendered by the Law Court, a verdict 
 having been obtained favorable to my client in 
 
 117 
 
the Court below after a very extended jury trial. 
 The case was taken to the Law Court by the 
 opposing party on motion, and under the motion, 
 no exceptions having been taken to the law, — at 
 the Law Court the point was sought to be made 
 that the verdict should not stand because the 
 law would not warrant it, notwithstanding the 
 facts proved at the trial, and assuming that they 
 would have warranted the verdict as a matter of 
 fact. The Law Court kept that case under 
 advisement for I think about three years, and 
 when it decided, sustained all the various legal 
 contentions upon which the verdict was based 
 except one, and that was the fundamental propo- 
 sition of the whole case, and was based, as I had 
 conceived, on practically a legal axiom, on a 
 proposition so inherently simple and nondeba- 
 table that it was necessarily law. The Law 
 Court, however, took the opposite view and said 
 that the law was to the contrary, and as a result 
 ordered a new trial. 
 
 Now the question which the Law Court had 
 thus passed upon was either obviously right as a 
 matter of law, or obviously wrong. It was an 
 elementary proposition, and I discovered, while 
 it seemed to me that the law was necessarily 
 wrong, elementarily wrong, — I discovered that 
 there was no possible way by which I could ask 
 the Law Court to reconsider its own decision 
 and submit for their consideration that, in our 
 judgment, there had been an inadvertent mis- 
 take of law made. 
 
 ii8 
 
And what was the result ? The result was that 
 the only method found possible was to retry the 
 whole case. In point of fact, we succeeded in 
 making an arrangement by which the evidence, 
 the printed record of the evidence, should be 
 taken as having been put in over again, thus 
 avoiding the expense of all the witnesses being 
 summoned again, and I made the same point as 
 I had before in regard to the law. Of course 
 the presiding justice over-ruled the point under 
 the decision of the full court, as he was bound to 
 do, and I asked an exception again and carried 
 the case to the Law Court again on the same 
 identical point ; and after the fullest argument, 
 and the fullest citation of authorities in that 
 case, the Law Court of the State reversed its 
 decision. And the late Chief Justice of the 
 State, who had drawn the original opinion, 
 which had been published in the books mean- 
 while, himself, and voluntarily, as I was informed 
 by some of my associates upon the Bench, took 
 upon himself the onus of drawing the reversing 
 opinion, stating with a magnanimity of mind 
 that stamped his greatness not only as a lawyer 
 but as a man, that he had been largely responsi- 
 ble for the original inadvertence of the Court, 
 for its original error, and he would draw the 
 opinion frankly stating that fact, and the two 
 opinions are now in the books. 
 
 Now this same Law Court would have reached 
 precisely the same result, without embarrass- 
 ment to themselves, without annoyance to the 
 
 119 
 
profession, without unnecessary expense to the 
 parties, had there been power given under our 
 statutes so that that decision after being made 
 could have stood for, say, thirty days, and within 
 that period either counsel might ask the Court 
 to reconsider any obvious error of either law or 
 fact, then the Court might modify or reverse 
 their opinion as they desired and no new trial 
 would then have been granted. In that case, 
 to further illustrate the hardship of the principle, 
 had we really been obliged to go through an 
 actual new trial, which formerly had occupied at 
 least ten days, and was one of the hardest 
 fought cases I was ever engaged in, — the means 
 of my client would have been absolutely inade- 
 quate to have even thought of doing it, for it had 
 more than strained his modest resources to 
 provide the witnesses for the original trial and to 
 maintain them at expense during the ten days of 
 the trial. Now I earnestly suggest to the mem- 
 bers of this Association the wisdom and the 
 imperative need of a change of legislation which 
 I think could be simply done and in the line with 
 the precedents of other states and of the United 
 States Courts in that particular. 
 
 There is only one other thing to which I desire 
 to call the attention of the members of this 
 Association. 
 
 I received a letter from a member of the 
 Bench of this State the other day in connection 
 with this meeting in which the learned judge 
 stated that though he knew I was conservative 
 
in my own views as to legal reform, he thought 
 I must admit there were certain things which 
 caused delay and entailed unnecessary expense. 
 
 One of those things, and the thing which to 
 my mind would save the greatest expense in 
 litigation, lies, it seems to me, in the absolute 
 power of the Court itself, by rule which it 
 should make, and which it seems to me ought to 
 be made, — and that is the over-burdensome cost 
 of printing a case, resulting from the manner in 
 which it is done, from the looseness of the print, 
 the small number of words upon a page, the 
 spreading of those over a very large space, and 
 the insertion verbatim of every question and 
 answer, whether material or immaterial. A 
 rule of Court that should require a given form, a 
 given number of words upon a page, and should 
 require, at least with proper reservations, all the 
 ordinary testimony to be in narrative form, so 
 that all the essential evidence could be served in 
 compact form both to counsel and to the Court. 
 Such a rule of Court, to my mind, would cut 
 down by one-third to one-half the expense of 
 printing; and, as is familiar to the members of 
 the Bar, the cost of printing after an extended 
 jury trial may often far exceed all the other 
 expenses, including those of counsel, in the case. 
 I respectfully suggest to the Association and to 
 the Court the desirability of saving in that 
 respect a wastefulness of expense. 
 
 Now, gentlemen, I do not and cannot forget 
 in closing that this is an Association of the 
 
members of the Bar. The distinguished judges 
 of the Court are members of this Association 
 ex vij-tute officii, and are always its most wel- 
 come guests when we can obtain their presence ; 
 but essentially this is an organization of the Bar; 
 and does not the roster of their names alone, 
 those who have graced this Bar, living and dead, 
 bring its note of encouragement to us as plain 
 members of the Bar of Maine ? 
 
 I yield to no man in my estimate of the high 
 duties and honors of the Bench, but I love to 
 think them fully matched by the opportunity 
 and career of a great lawyer at the Bar. 
 
 The voices which echo down the dim corridors 
 of history, the trumpet tones that have daunted 
 oppression and stirred the nations to liberty 
 have come in surprising numbers from the 
 master minds of the Anglo-Saxon Bar. Erskine, 
 Grattan, Fox, Emmett and Burke in England; 
 Patrick Henry, the Adamses, Hamilton and 
 Sumner in America, to speak not of more recent 
 names, are the men whose great hammer strokes 
 have slowly beat out for us the divine, imperish- 
 able shape of human liberty. 
 
 Over against the career of a judge upon the 
 Bench, I would set for a moment the career 
 within grasp of a great leader at the Bar — self- 
 respecting and never servile, wise and conserva- 
 tive in counsel yet courageous in his convictions 
 both as to law and fact, proud of winning his 
 case yet not dismayed by temporary defeat, 
 setting store by the books yet setting greater 
 
store by the power of original thinking and the 
 luminous unfolding of legal principles which 
 alone give value to the books, sullied by no taint 
 of dishonor yet daring all things else in discharg- 
 ing his duty to his client, — all of us are justly 
 proud to follow, etiam longo intervallo, such an 
 exalted ideal. 
 
 I love to feel that the ambitions aimed at by a 
 great judge upon the Bench and a great leader 
 at the Bar are different indeed, but not in lofti- 
 ness ; that where they deviate, it is not like two 
 ways of which one seeks the valley and one the 
 height, but, rather, like ways which climb dis- 
 tinct yet kindred peaks, both towering into a 
 rarer air. And so along the way, when we again 
 press upward, now perhaps in some darkness, 
 now catching the gleam of stars, we are proud to 
 feel that the word which passes through the night 
 from Bench to Bar, from Bar to Bench, from 
 mountain top to mountain top, is not a cry for 
 help, but the friendly hail of equals, each seek- 
 ing a higher plane. I thank you, gentlemen, 
 again. (Applause.) 
 
 123 
 
JOHN A. PETERS 
 April 2, igo4 
 
 One dead— a State in tears ! Yet all the earth 
 Brest for a festival ! Could he come back, 
 Think you he might not choose, himself, that June, 
 The rose -appareled, deck his memory. 
 Whose days, like June's, were dipped in splendid dyes? 
 
 Richly he lived. The streaming years that went, 
 Were each a very Pactolus to him, 
 And grains of gold ran, glittering, through his talk. 
 
 Joyously, too, he lived. No bitterness — 
 But, as the robin doth with song the day 
 Outwear, so with him, whatsoe'er he did, 
 His spirit always sang. 
 
 Justly he lived. Facing, indeed, his truth. 
 The lie, unspoken, died upon the lip. 
 On his clear vision no one might impose, 
 Who sought the law for malice or offence. 
 Friendships he had, and strong, but yet no man 
 Who lived, upon that friendship dared presume 
 For favor, or to gain a wrongful cause. 
 His gentleness did not o'er shallows run ; 
 Let but injustice raise her front, and then 
 The sunny depths of his great nature stirred 
 To awful indignation. All men knew. 
 Instinctively, who in his presence were, 
 Justice, with her white robe, did wrap him round. 
 
 Greatly he lived. Not sky, nor solemn stars. 
 Deep woods vexed by no wind, nor aught beside 
 Of high, appeasing beauty God doth show, 
 Move more serenely in their ministries. 
 Than this great Judge among his fellow men. 
 
 125 
 
Calm in his own, respecting others' strength, 
 Envy he knew not, malice could not know, 
 Whose nature was all magnanimity. 
 His rectitude bred no uncharity, 
 Justice with mercy tempered was his creed, 
 Human himself, he loved humanity. 
 
 Richly if he received, he richly gave ; 
 Miser of words, but prodigal of thought — 
 Which words must stand for, else remain but words — 
 His phrase was terse and tense. His sentences 
 Did not in open order march, but stood 
 Serried and close, ranks full, for battle drawn. 
 
 Despite past triumphs of the common law, 
 Full many a problem still were unresolved. 
 But for some great deliverance, or some 
 Illuminating phrase, which he has left. 
 Men gladly glean where he did richly reap. 
 And we, who follow after, are made proud 
 By even one wisp of gold, if from his sheaves. 
 
 Yet even for him the end, as comes to all. 
 His high and ministering office, where 
 He bore himself so long and worthily. 
 Freely he put away, and was content 
 To rest awhile before the stream was crossed. 
 Hail and be hailed of friends, and take his leave. 
 
 From dust — through glorj^ — back again to dust! 
 Wanting but this, the cycle to complete, 
 A little room to lie, a little sleep, 
 Then — swift surprise of immortality ! 
 
 Even to the end, walking the sunset-path. 
 Life but a mellow light from out the past, 
 His glistening honors by himself put off. 
 Naught to bestow, or crave — even thus, by some 
 Blithe necromancy of his spirit, he 
 Held all men to him as with hooks of steel. 
 
 126 
 
The grace that was not grace alone, but strength, 
 Unwounding wit, sun-lit philosophy. 
 Deep knowledge of mankind — these all were thine. 
 Departed Friend ! Never again shall we 
 Behold thy like ! And yet, because we know 
 The soul that was within thee hath but struck 
 Its earthly tent, to pitch it once anew 
 Upon those plains where camp the glorious Dead, 
 We, who yet stay, and came today to mourn, 
 Sprinkle, instead, June roses on thy grave. 
 
 127 
 
MEMORIALS 
 
ORVILLE D. BAKER 
 
 Ke7tnebec Journal, August l8, igo8 
 
 The news of the sudden death of Hon. Orville 
 D. Baker came as a great shock to the com- 
 munity. A man in the prime and vigor of life, 
 the future certainly seemed to promise him 
 fullness of years. His death removes from our 
 midst one of our ablest and most prominent 
 citizens. He was recognized as one of the great 
 lawyers of New England, a man of integrity, 
 loyal to his clients, strong in his friendships, and 
 tolerant in all things. He knew how to give and 
 take hard blows in any cause in which he was 
 enlisted; but he never cherished unworthy re- 
 sentments or carried away the scars of battle. 
 Born and reared in Augusta, Mr. Baker was 
 always intensely interested in all that pertained 
 to the growth and welfare of our city. He was 
 ready at all times and in all places, to champion 
 her cause. 
 
 The removal of such a man from our midst in 
 the very zenith of his strength and activity, is 
 indeed a great loss to the community and one 
 which is deeply felt by all our citizens. 
 
 General Baker was more than a great lawyer. 
 He was a great scholar, a man of the broadest 
 culture, and a conversationalist of rare brilliancy. 
 
 131 
 
It was in the quiet of his own home, which after 
 the death of his father he always maintained in 
 this city, that he was seen at his best. There, 
 throwing off the cares and worries of his busy 
 professional life, he took a keen delight in the 
 society of his friends, finding a peculiar pleasure 
 in those whose tastes, like his own, ran in 
 literary channels. With his rare grace of dic- 
 tion, and his keen analytical mind General Baker, 
 had he devoted his life to letters, as he did to 
 law, might have won even greater laurels in the 
 field of authorship. 
 
 He had in a marvelous degree, the power of 
 mental concentration, which enabled him to 
 assimilate rapidly and clearly the details of any 
 subject which engrossed his attention. He had 
 a wonderful capacity for hard work, and was 
 equal to long sustained effort, that would have 
 been impossible to a man of less physical and 
 mental vigor. 
 
 But after all, perhaps, the most striking thing 
 about him was the lightness with which he 
 apparently bore the many and exacting cares of 
 his busy professional life. The face he turned 
 to the world was always a genial and smiling 
 one. If he had worries, he certainly was master 
 of the art of concealing them from his associates. 
 He rarely talked shop with his friends, appar- 
 ently finding a keen zest in the discussion of 
 topics outside of his legal activities. He was an 
 orator of rare gifts, with a strong personality, a 
 wonderful command of pure English, a pleasing 
 
 132 
 
voice, and rare power in marshaling and present- 
 ing facts. He was also an after-dinner speaker 
 of exceptional brilliancy, and one who took an 
 unfeigned delight in the bonhomie of such 
 occasions. The people of Augusta will unite in 
 mourning his loss. 
 
 133 
 
ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 
 
 Maine Farmer, August ig, igo8 
 
 Orville Dewey Baker of Augusta died in- 
 stantly last Sunday evening of heart disease, 
 from which he had been suffering for some time. 
 
 Mr. Baker was born in Augusta and would 
 have been sixty-one years old next December. 
 He was an only child and was never married. 
 
 His father, Joseph Baker, himself a lawyer of 
 exceptional ability, early designed for his son 
 that profession. Orville Baker graduated from 
 Bowdoin College and the Harvard Law School 
 and then began the practice of law with his 
 father. His success was immediate and con- 
 tinued in ever increasing measure to the time of 
 his death. He had a wonderful mind in a 
 magnificent body, and early made his chosen 
 profession his chief object in life. For him, but 
 two things were really of importance : His 
 work which he loved, and the recreations he felt 
 necessary to maintain his health. He had no 
 diversity of occupations whatever. As he had 
 chosen the law for his life work, so he made it 
 such. His life work, the law, was always first, 
 everything else came afterward. He might 
 have made a great success in political life, for he 
 would have adorned any position ; but the only 
 
 135 
 
public position he ever held, that of Attorney 
 General, was distinctly in the line of his profes- 
 sion. He might have made a great success in 
 business, but as he had chosen the law, so he 
 made it the end and aim of his working life. To 
 this singleness of purpose, may be attributed his 
 pre-eminent successes. 
 
 As Attorney General, while still a young man, 
 he made a State reputation for himself by win- 
 ning, for the State, the conviction of Stain and 
 Cromwell in the celebrated Barron murder case. 
 His victories as counsel for the leading indi- 
 viduals and corporations of the State have been 
 so many and so signal that he easily ranked as 
 Maine's ablest lawyer, and as second to none in 
 New England. In fact, competent judges have 
 assigned him rank with the leading half dozen 
 lawyers of this country. 
 
 As an advocate he was eloquent and convinc- 
 ing, but his great power was in his ability to 
 concentrate all his powers on the case in hand. 
 When he took up a case, there was for him, for 
 the time being, nothing else whatever. He first 
 learned his case thoroughly, both the ins and 
 outs, then he learned his opponent's case. No 
 detail was too small or too unimportant for his 
 attention. His examination and cross-examina- 
 tion of witnesses was masterly. His knowledge 
 of the law was profound, and his briefs were 
 models of legal logic. 
 
 During the past six years, Mr. Baker won 
 added honors by his services for the various 
 
 '36 
 
water companies whose properties have been 
 taken by certain municipalities under the name 
 of water districts. These were certainly the 
 largest and most important cases ever at bar in 
 this State, the six in which Mr. Baker was chief 
 counsel aggregating nearlj^ five and a half 
 millions of dollars. These cases involved new 
 legal practice for this State, and, in the course 
 of these trials, chiefly through Mr. Baker's 
 abilities, precedents and rules have been made 
 which the courts, and the people, through their 
 Legislatures, have established as marking the 
 way by which equal justice may be done the 
 people and such corporations. 
 
 Twenty-one months ago, Mr. Baker became 
 suddenly aware that he was suffering from the 
 fatal disease which caused his death, and that he 
 could not hope for long life. With a courage 
 that was sublime, after fifty-nine years of superb 
 physical health, he faced the inevitable, and went 
 steadfastly on with his work. He was in full 
 possession of his marvelous mental powers to the 
 instant of his death. In fact, he recently con- 
 ducted the longest and most important suit ever 
 tried in this State, that of the appraisal of the 
 Portland water companies, at which, in his con- 
 cluding argument, he spoke for four days with 
 only the briefest notes. At the Bowdoin Col- 
 lege Commencement in June, he spoke for the 
 class of 1868, in reference to the present elective 
 system, and his speech was the gem of the 
 occasion. 
 
 137 
 
There are many lessons to be learned from 
 Mr. Baker's life, and the chiefest of these are 
 the necessity, the value and the dignity of work. 
 Blessed as he was with superb health, gifted 
 mentally as he so wonderfully was, he relied 
 only upon his personal attributes as tools with 
 which to carve out success. He chose his life 
 work and then with an eye single for that and 
 that alone aimed for the topmost point of his 
 profession. This he reached, and his untimely 
 death loses to the State of Maine one of its truly 
 great men. 
 
 He bore his honors modestly, his burdens 
 bravely, and to us who were privileged to know 
 him intimately, and so to love him, his early 
 going to a better world brings the deepest sense 
 of personal loss. 
 
 138 
 
AS A MAN AND LAWYER 
 Portland Daily Press, August //, igo8 
 
 Well might the people of Maine say with one 
 of old that a prince and a great man has fallen. 
 Mr. Baker filled a great place at the bar, in 
 politics and in a higher sense in the social life of 
 the State. He was a strong man and person- 
 ality, and his reputation made at a comparatively 
 early age increased with every year of his pro- 
 fessional life. 
 
 Those who knew him during the closing years 
 of his career will remember the erect figure, the 
 noble head crowned with gray hair, the musical 
 voice, and the almost marvelous command of 
 choice and vigorous English. 
 
 He delighted in a great legal battle. His 
 mind was eminently judicial. He could see the 
 strong as well as the weak points in the case his 
 opponent would present, and he never made the 
 mistake of undervaluing the opposing attorney. 
 There were times when his presentation of a 
 case became almost that of the court, but he 
 never failed at the end to show the strong and 
 as he felt dominating force of his own conten- 
 tion. He sometimes made his case turn on a 
 single point, conceding all the rest to his oppo- 
 nent and then he became almost irresistible 
 because he brought to the consideration of the 
 
 ^39 
 
central point all his great powers and all his 
 logic and eloquence. 
 
 He had a touch of the grand manner we 
 associate now with the old school of lawyers and 
 of gentlemen. He never abused an opponent, 
 never for a moment failed in courtesy, and his 
 cross examination of witnesses while searching 
 and sharp never went beyond that point. His 
 great desire was to establish his case by evidence 
 and logic not to be shaken. 
 
 There were times when Mr. Baker became 
 very eloquent. His sense of fair play and all 
 that it should mean to all men was very high, 
 and any attempt on the part of an attorney to 
 take undue and as he felt uncalled for advantage, 
 or to put a strained and needless interpretation 
 on any portion of the evidence called from him 
 hot words of strong and earnest condemnation 
 made all the more stinging because he rested his 
 case on the law and the evidence as a whole, and 
 scorned to make a personal application. 
 
 His knowledge of the law was great, and he 
 seemed to those who followed him through a 
 case to have the authorities always at his com- 
 mand. He did not pile case on case or use 
 words needlessly but his briefs deserved the 
 name, and he was content when he had mar- 
 shalled his citations and showed their direct 
 bearing on the case before the court. 
 
 He was a great jury lawyer. He carried a 
 jury wdth him to the conclusion he sought to 
 reach largely because he was thoroughly con- 
 
 140 
 
vinced himself that no other conclusion could 
 possibly be attained, and that no other theory 
 could be reasonably entertained. He presented 
 a criminal case in an almost irresistible way. 
 Circumstantial evidence others, lawyers as well 
 as laymen, thought could be explained away he 
 made a great chain, link fitting to link until he 
 left the jury no other course than to find the 
 respondent guilty. 
 
 His political addresses were of the same order. 
 He was a man of strong convictions, but he 
 never knowingly or willingly placed party before 
 country. He was ambitious to win the highest 
 success in his profession, but he did not show 
 any desire to receive high political honors. He 
 would have rendered splendid service to the 
 State in any position, but he felt the high impor- 
 tance of his profession, and he was at once a 
 safe attorney and a wise counsellor. 
 
 He was a great worker. He was not content 
 to know much about a case in which he was 
 interested, but felt that he must know all that 
 any man could hope to know of it. He mastered 
 a case in all its details, and when he stood before 
 a court and jury he was ready to proceed. 
 
 His eloquence, and as has been said, there 
 were times when he became very eloquent, was 
 natural to the man. He had great command of 
 the most vigorous English. He read deeply, 
 drew from the great masters of the English 
 language the best they had to give him, and 
 then he charmed and convinced. He could be 
 
 141 
 
sarcastic, he was witty, and his wit was like that 
 of Thomas B. Reed, at times, but he never tried 
 to show his learning, or to be eloquent for the 
 sake of making a personal reputation. 
 
 He was honest. He did not deceive a client, 
 but rather made the points of law and the 
 matters of fact against a client more prominent 
 at the counsel table than those in his favor. He 
 discouraged litigation and felt the supreme im- 
 portance of going into court, if at all, as a last 
 resort. 
 
 A long succession of learned and distinguished 
 justices of the Supreme court listened to his 
 presentation of points of law with unflagging 
 interest. A long succession of juries heard his 
 marshalling of his evidence and his logical argu- 
 ments and were convinced. 
 
 His nature was kindly. He did not court the 
 favorable notice of the press or seek for formal 
 and perhaps unmeaning congratulation, but he 
 was grateful for appreciative words, and was 
 great enough to say so. He was a manly man 
 in all respects, a well-rounded man, a well- 
 balanced nature, a brilliant intellect, finely 
 equipped for the doing of his best every time. 
 
 He rose to every occasion. He was a large 
 man, a man capable of taking a broad view of 
 things. He was at once a student and a man 
 of affairs. His was a very high ideal of the law; 
 his a high ideal of life. 
 
 He was a brave man. He knew, it is said, 
 that he could not hope to see length of years, 
 
 142 
 
but he faced the white light of eternity and 
 went straight forward to do his appointed work 
 in this world. Higher courage no man has, 
 higher courage no man ever had, or ever can 
 have than this. He was his bright, true and 
 manly self to the last. 
 
 And now this great lawyer, brilliant and 
 eloquent advocate and leader of the people has 
 fallen. He seemed to those who only saw him 
 in court or on the street to be in the best of 
 health and the news of his sudden death will be 
 a great shock to his friends, to the bar, and to 
 his fellow citizens. 
 
 He will be long remembered. He was of the 
 goodly company of great lawyers and safe coun- 
 sellors of the land, and he was in the line of 
 succession to the great lawyers of the past. He 
 loved the basic principles of the law, and felt 
 that the end to be sought was fair play and 
 justice. It is not too much to say that in all his 
 professional life and in his life outside of his 
 profession he believed in the square deal. 
 
 He was a great citizen of a great State. He 
 loved Maine and had for his State ideals no less 
 lofty than he applied to his daily life. Those 
 who knew him the best will mourn for him the 
 most and no higher tribute than that can be 
 paid to any man. 
 
 No longer young, and yet with the snow-line 
 still in the distance, he went out of life at a time 
 when he had the most ample control of his great 
 powers and when he might have taken for his 
 
 143 
 
motto the words applied to one of the most 
 knightly of men, "Always ready." 
 
 Sad indeed would it be if we were forced to 
 believe that he has passed from life unto death; 
 right joyous is the thought, the hope, and even 
 the abiding conviction that he has but exchanged 
 a lower form of life for a greater, and that to 
 him came not the message of death, but the call 
 of the Master of Life, " Come up higher." 
 
 144 
 
MEMORIAL SERVICES 
 
MEMORIAL SERVICES 
 
 Memorial services were held by the Kennebec 
 Bar at the Court House at Augusta, Tuesday, 
 December i, 1908, before Associate Justice 
 Whitehouse (presiding), Associate Justice Spear 
 and Associate Justice Cornish, in honor of Hon. 
 Albert G. Andrews, Hon. Lendall Titcomb, 
 Hon. Orville D. Baker and Hon. Simon S. 
 Brown, deceased during the year. 
 
 A committee consisting of Hon. Charles F. 
 Johnson, Hon. Herbert M. Heath, M. S. 
 Holway, Esq., Hon. George W. Heselton and 
 Harvey D. Eaton, Esq., presented resolutions 
 upon the death of Hon. Orville Dewey Baker, 
 by its chairman, Hon. Charles F. Johnson. 
 Eulogies were pronounced by several members 
 of the Bar, that by Hon. Herbert M. Heath 
 being nearly identical with his study of Orville 
 Baker as a lawyer ; page 1 1 of this volume. 
 
 147 
 
Hon. C. F. Johnson 
 
 May it please the Court : 
 
 On the morning of August 17th, 1908, the 
 newspapers contained the startling announce- 
 ment that Hon. Orville Dewey Baker, a member 
 of this Bar, had passed quickly, without pain or 
 lingering sickness, from life to death, not without 
 some warning to him and to some of his intimate 
 friends, but to most of us with no knowledge of 
 his lessened hold on life. 
 
 Bench, Bar, and all classes of citizens realized 
 that a great lawyer had laid down his work. 
 Jurists and lawyers who could estimate the 
 depth and extent of his legal knowledge, friends 
 who appreciated his dignified, courtly manners 
 and his engaging social qualities, clients with 
 large business interests which depended upon 
 his great legal ability for their protection all felt 
 that they had sustained a great loss. 
 
 While stunned by the suddenness of the 
 shock, all were grateful that if the end must 
 come, that it was not approached slowly with 
 gradually diminishing health and loss of physical 
 strength and that his sun set amid the full glow 
 of the gorgeous colors which his great intel- 
 lectuality and his splendid physical strength had 
 created about it. It was well that it was so, for 
 who that knew him but would have shrunk from 
 
 149 
 
contemplating that splendid form, erect in all its 
 manly vigor, bowed and wasted by disease, that 
 strong, clear, active intellect weakened and 
 clouded by physical pain! As we knew him, so 
 he was to the last, a meteor in the legal heavens, 
 flashing its rays of brilliant light to the very end 
 of its course. 
 
 In none was the sense of propriety more fully 
 developed than in our friend, and none yielded 
 more readily to that sense, so that much of the 
 charm of his life and its success was due to it. 
 I feel compelled by my appreciation of this, to 
 attempt that which I know he would have me 
 attempt, and, to avoid unstinted eulogy, but at 
 the same time to pay that just tribute to his 
 memory which truth and justice demand. 
 
 That he was a great lawyer all will admit, but 
 his greatness as a lawyer was not confined to 
 any special field, and in this he was particularly 
 distinguished. Of a strong poetic nature, so 
 that in conversation about common things, the 
 mere small talk of the ofifice or the social hour, 
 he spoke the language of imagery and delighted 
 in word painting; he was also gifted with 
 stronger reasoning powers ; but whether he 
 addressed the jury or the Court, friends gathered 
 at the banquet table, or large gatherings of 
 citizens, his imagination never led him from the 
 firm base on which his reason bade him stand. 
 He was, therefore, always clear, and however 
 much his ideas were adorned by figures of 
 speech or beautiful words, they were not thereby 
 
 150 
 
obscured, but rendered more impressive by the 
 dress in which they were attired. The dry facts 
 of a long hearing deahng with expert knowledge, 
 long tabulations and wearisome details were 
 made attractive and interesting by the dress in 
 which he clothed them. Subtle reasoning upon 
 great questions of law fixed attention because of 
 the apt words with which it proceeded, but 
 neither his facts nor his law were buried beneath 
 his word painting, for he was not a dauber, but 
 an artist who knew how to bring out the natural 
 qualities of the objects upon which he exercised 
 his art. He did not veneer, but brought out 
 and developed the grains of the natural wood by 
 his polish of words. 
 
 Fortunate in his natural abilities and in his 
 early training under the special care of a fond 
 and proud father, himself a great lawyer, he was 
 also no less fortunate in the control of his great 
 powers, so that all in him worked harmoniously 
 and preserved their perfect relation. He, there- 
 fore, spoke easily, gracefully and eloquently, but 
 always with good sense, and full comprehension 
 of the fitness of things. He was an orator of a 
 high order, but he never allowed this easy path 
 to popularity to lead him from considering the 
 sound reason of things. He preferred to exer- 
 cise his great talents in the line of his profession 
 rather than upon the platform or on the hustings. 
 
 How the dull air of many a court room has 
 been enlivened and lightened by the brilliant 
 words shot across it by him, true to the mark! 
 
 151 
 
Our friend was more than a great lawyer, he 
 was a great man, he loved good books, he loved 
 the beautiful in art and in nature. He would 
 have been eminently successful if he had chosen 
 a literary career. Many of his speeches were 
 gems of art, and his poem on Chief Justice 
 Peters shows how strong the poetic nature was 
 within him. Nature appealed to him as it does 
 to all strong minds; he knew the songs of the 
 birds, their habits, their seasons of flight and 
 return, and he loved the ocean and his vacations 
 by its shore. A walk with him would disclose 
 how strong a tie there was between his great 
 mind and the common things of life. He knew 
 men, too, and none could weigh them more 
 accurately than he. How his searching cross- 
 examinations bore down the barriers behind 
 which witnesses sought to conceal the truth, and 
 how accurately he guessed at their motives and 
 drew them out to view by his unerring knowl- 
 edge of human nature ! 
 
 Our friend also knew and practiced the courte- 
 sies of our profession, for he was by nature and 
 training a gentleman. It is pleasant to recall 
 his cheery greeting, his courteous manners. 
 While in the heat of a trial he often spoke 
 warmly and with strong convictions in defense 
 of his client's rights, and was able to hold his 
 own in the give and take of repartee, he always 
 had himself under control and his language was 
 uniformly courteous to opposing counsel and to 
 the Court, without the display of any irritability. 
 
 152 
 
Kennebec Bar and the State have lost a great 
 lawyer, a dignified, courteous gentleman, many 
 of us a kind friend whose genial manner we 
 recall with pleasure, and in performance of the 
 duty delegated to me by the Kennebec Bar 
 Association, I offer the following resolutions: 
 
 153 
 
RESOLUTIONS 
 
 Resolved, That in the death of Hon. Orville 
 Dewey Baker the Kennebec Bar Association 
 has lost a most distinguished member, whose 
 great learning and ability displayed in the whole 
 field of practice of the law gave him high rank 
 among the great lawyers of our State, whose 
 natural eloquence embellished by learning and 
 the grace of a charming literary style and 
 strengthened by sound common sense and deep 
 convictions always delighted and seldom failed 
 to convince ; whose dignity, courtesy and gentle- 
 manly bearing made his presence everywhere 
 pleasing and agreeable, whose extensive knowl- 
 edge of the law and his love for and devotion to 
 its practice with his high ideals of a lawyer's 
 duty have added greater dignity and importance 
 to our profession. 
 
 Resolved, That the Kennebec Bar Association 
 is proud of his honors and his achievements and 
 feeling itself fortunate that he was one of its 
 members during the whole of his illustrious 
 professional life, will long cherish the memory 
 of the great legal mind, eloquent tongue and dis- 
 tinguished presence which so highly honored it. 
 
 154 
 
Melvin S. Holway 
 
 May it please the Coiiri : 
 
 Highly do I esteem the privilege of taking- 
 part in these solemn exercises devoted to the 
 commemoration of the four departed members 
 of our Bar but recently taken from us. Great 
 and unprecedented in our history is this suc- 
 cession of bereavements and tragic in their 
 suddenness were the deaths of three, one being 
 that of Orville Dewey Baker, our distinguished 
 leader. I knew him from my youth. I enjoyed 
 his friendship for many years — our acquaintance 
 grew closer as time went by. I found him 
 always a delightful companion, a loyal and 
 helpful friend, and his unexpected and prema- 
 ture death leaves me with the consciousness of 
 great, irreparable loss. 
 
 The impression Orville Baker made upon me 
 was that of a man whose rare natural powers 
 were fully developed for the purposes to which 
 he devoted his life. He made himself a great 
 lawyer. In public life he might have been 
 great ; in literature, and possibly in other forms 
 of art, he might have excelled. Like other great 
 men his life showed constant growth until he 
 attained the absolute mastery of his profession, 
 and in full control of his matured powers with 
 no decline towards old age and its waning 
 
 155 
 
faculties, he passed away leaving as an enduring 
 monument his record of splendid achievements. 
 An only son of a distinguished lawyer, his 
 training from youth was intended to fit him for 
 distinction as a scholar, an orator and for 
 success in the law. He has told me in recent 
 months of the great debt he owed to his training 
 in the Augusta High School under that dis- 
 tinguished teacher, Mr. Frank Waterhouse. 
 Mr. Waterhouse made friends of his students, 
 encouraged them in athletic sports for their 
 suitable physical development. He made them 
 feel ashamed of ignorance and inferiority. He 
 was able to excite in them a keen interest in 
 their studies and the desire to excel in whatever 
 they undertook. From success in school, the 
 position of a leader in his ever-loved Bowdoin 
 College and in the Harvard Law School, and 
 after a well-spent year in Europe, Mr. Baker 
 entered upon the duties of his profession. Of 
 his life-long devotion to his work, of his con- 
 stantly increasing success we all know. He v/as 
 a good son. The affectionate relations between 
 himself and his father were peculiarly close. 
 He always showed to his mother the greatest 
 deference and highest regard; they lived until 
 Mr. Baker reached the age of thirty-five years, 
 and then in the same year both were taken from 
 him. Mr. Baker always sought and was wel- 
 come in the best society, and doubtless owed 
 much to the brilliant and able men and to the 
 refined and cultivated women whose acquain- 
 
 156 
 
tance he enjoyed. Although the citizen of a 
 small town, he saw men like Blaine and Morrill 
 rise to distinction in the nation, and other of our 
 citizens achieve triumphs in law, in public life, 
 in great business enterprises, which could not 
 fail to stir the ambition of a man of his unusual 
 powers. 
 
 He achieved mastery of the arts of advocacy 
 and a profound knowledge of the law. He was 
 powerful in attack, stubborn in defense, tireless 
 in his efforts and most thorough in his prepara- 
 tion of cases. His powers were such that he 
 seemed to do with ease what others could only 
 do with difficulty. With a great capacity for 
 work and devotion to his chosen profession, with 
 a love for the battles of the law, he went on 
 from success to greater success and was long an 
 acknowledged leader. He was happy, too, in his 
 profession, believed it worthy of his best efforts 
 and loved to labor for the interests of his clients. 
 
 He was a most companionable man. He loved 
 his home, his native town, and had the genius 
 which appreciates simple, everyday things, life in 
 the open air, walks along the country roads and 
 through woodland paths and viewing from some 
 commanding height the varied beauties of the 
 landscape. He loved to look often upon familiar 
 scenes and find ever-new beauty therein. To 
 him every sunset was a revelation of the beauty 
 of the universe. He loved to dwell with the 
 sound of the sea in his ears and pass his hours 
 in watching its mighty and mysterious move- 
 
 157 
 
ments. He loved the birds and to spend silent, 
 patient hours in studying their beauties of shape, 
 plumage and movement, in listening" to their 
 songs and calls and learning the natures of these 
 aerial visitors. He loved his pets and other 
 four-footed friends, and little children, and all 
 these were attracted to him. 
 
 And above all he loved his friends ; he liked 
 to have them about him ; he gave freely of his 
 intelligence, his wit, the resources of his richly- 
 stored mind, to the companions of his leisure 
 hours. He delighted to fill his home with 
 choice, rare and beautiful objects of art and to 
 dispense refined and bountiful hospitality to his 
 friends and associates. 
 
 While he had passed beyond the stage of 
 loving knowledge for its own sake and did not 
 occupy himself over-much with books, his inter- 
 est in life in the great, varied, wonderful world 
 was never more fresh and keen than when, at 
 the climax of success, with the shout of victory 
 ringing in his ears, the summons came for him 
 to go. In the midst of the glories of mid- 
 summer, at the close of a perfect Sabbath day 
 at his beautiful home by the resounding sea, 
 surrounded by loving friends and familiar faces, 
 mercifully spared all suffering, he sank to rest. 
 
 He leaves to us who mourn the feeling that 
 the memory of our acquaintance and companion- 
 ship with him will ever be one of the choice 
 treasures of our life. 
 
 158 
 
Harvey D. Eaton 
 
 Orville Dewey Baker was a great man. His 
 tireless industry, his legal acumen, his command- 
 ing intellectual power were known and recog- 
 nized of all. His genial and kindly qualities 
 were equally strong. It was my privilege to 
 know him as my personal friend and counsellor 
 as well as colleague and opponent, and in all 
 those relations I enjoyed from Mr. Baker such 
 kindness and consideration as is only seldom 
 shown, and made his sudden loss a personal 
 grief to me. 
 
 159 
 
Hon. W. p. Whitehouse 
 
 On the fourth day of December 1883, almost 
 precisely a quarter of a century ago, in this hall 
 of justice which for more than forty years had 
 been the principal scene of his forensic labors 
 and triumphs, memorial exercises were held in 
 the superior court upon- the death of Joseph 
 Baker, a distinguished member of this Bar, who 
 had for many years been acknowledged as one of 
 the most learned and accomplished lawyers and 
 powerful advocates in our State. It became 
 my sad privilege to respond to the resolutions 
 then presented as an expression of deep sorrow 
 for his loss and sincere respect for his memory. 
 In his earlier life he had been a successful jour- 
 nalist, and had repeatedly been the recipient of 
 political honors from his fellow citizens, but with 
 these temporary diversions he remained constant 
 in his desire and purpose to bend his mind to the 
 philosophy of the law and make the practice of 
 the legal profession the work of his life ; and 
 though it was then said of him that he "touched 
 nothing which he did not adorn," yet like the 
 fabled Ant?eus he seemed to draw invincible 
 strength only when his feet touched the solid 
 earth of his chosen profession. 
 
 Orville Dewey Baker was the son of Joseph 
 and Frances Rogers Baker. His mother was a 
 
 160 
 
sister of the famous Jonathan P. Rogers, a 
 lawyer distinguished alike for his mastery of 
 legal principles and his skill and power as 
 advocate, who practiced for some years in 
 Bangor as the partner of Edward Kent and 
 afterward removed to Boston at the personal 
 request of Daniel Webster, where he " died in 
 comparative youth in the midst of a growing 
 fame." The traditions of both the Penobscot 
 and Suffolk bars have united in presenting 
 Jonathan Rogers to the succeeding generations 
 as a legal giant. 
 
 Orville Baker was endowed with intellectual 
 gifts and powers of a very high order, and from 
 his early childhood to the time of his entering 
 upon the practice of the law, his academic and 
 legal education, as well as his entire'^ mental 
 development, progressed under the constant 
 supervision and vigilant care of his devoted 
 father. The ripe scholarship which was the 
 fruition of his course at Bowdoin College was 
 succeeded by appreciative travel and study in 
 foreign countries. With such broad and liberal 
 culture as a foundation, he prosecuted his legal 
 studies at Harvard Law School and graduated 
 with a comprehensive grasp of the science of the 
 law unsurpassed by that of any other graduate 
 in that decade. He entered upon the practice 
 of the law injpartnership with his father, with a 
 splendid equipment for the pursuit of the most 
 imperial and exacting of all the learned profes- 
 sions, and he came per saltinn into the front 
 
 i6i 
 
rank of the best legal scholars and ablest trial 
 lawyers of the State. I well remember the first 
 important jury trial in which during the second 
 year of his practice, he was put forward by 
 the senior member of the firm to make the 
 closing argument to the jury. With an orderly 
 grouping of the relevant facts about each of the 
 propositions, with much rhetorical adornment 
 and elaboration, with caustic satire and glowing 
 eloquence, the argument was pressed forward to 
 its logical conclusion. Although in this first 
 case the evidence was not accepted by the jury 
 as sufficient to support the premises of the 
 argument, the effort was recognized by all as 
 one of distinguished ability and splendid promise. 
 
 " Then felt we like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken." 
 
 That a new and brilliant luminary had flashed 
 into Maine's constellation of the law was 
 promptly recognized throughout the State. If 
 any had lingering doubts at that time whether 
 he possessed the practical wisdom, the correct 
 mental poise and the intuitive sense of common 
 right which are indispensible to the highest 
 success in the profession, their doubts were 
 promptly removed by rapidly succeeding efforts of 
 his subsequent career, which abundantly fulfilled 
 the brilliancy of early promise. Under the 
 chastening influences of superior culture and the 
 study of the masterpieces of P^nglish oratory, he 
 avoided the excessive use of words of Latin 
 
 162 
 
origin and "escaped the common perils of mag- 
 niloquence." With a rich vocabulary of both 
 Latin and Saxon words, his addresses disclosed 
 no fixed preference for either, but he aptly chose 
 the term which most exactly and forcibly ex- 
 pressed the pressing thought or dominant mood 
 of the moment. He was also endowed in an 
 eminent degree with the faculty of imagination 
 which enabled him by striking illustrations to 
 give vividness to every scene and increased 
 power to the expression of every thought. The 
 opening paragraph of his address at a recent 
 memorial service may be quoted as at once an 
 illustration of the elegance of his diction and the 
 beauty of his imagery, and an expression of the 
 infinite pathos of this occasion, as well as of that, 
 when one in the full possession of all his facul- 
 ties and in full tide and stress of his useful work, 
 has passed away in the midst of his earthly 
 years. 
 
 "At times we are strikingly reminded that, 
 close beside the borders of life, set with all its 
 blooms, flows the river of death, into whose 
 forbidding waters no man may step and then 
 return, and no man who has once entered may 
 send answer back from the farther shore. When 
 it comes to one who is frail with sickness, or 
 weary with the hardships of life, the fingers of 
 death are soft and even welcome, and draw one 
 gently to repose. But when it overtakes, as it 
 did here, the strong man in harness, it must give 
 us pause, in order that we may cast a glance at 
 
 163 
 
the life, the character and the career of him who 
 has left us." 
 
 Another illustration of his figurative style 
 may be found at the close of his argument in the 
 proceedings by address before the Maine Legis- 
 lature in 1 891. "Now that the clamor of this 
 great debate and cause will soon be still — as of 
 old after the wind, the earthquake and the storm, 
 there is to come that still, small voice in the 
 conscience of every one of you which is to pass 
 upon and decide this question. The State, no 
 individual, is on trial here. Individuals may 
 come or go, but justice and the State endure. 
 Even fame is a candle almost as brief as life 
 itself, and honor and disgrace alike will soon be 
 put to sleep by the sprinkled poppy of oblivion. 
 But there remains with us the majesty of the 
 eternal justice." 
 
 " You are here in the broad and noble spirit of 
 the old Roman Senate, to see that the Republic 
 takes no harm. If you should omit this duty, if 
 you should betray this trust, 
 
 ' Not poppy or mandragora, 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
 Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, 
 Which thou owedst yesterday.' 
 
 You are the watchers on the coast. Beneath 
 you are the rocks. One fair ship, with its freight 
 of talent and of promise, has just sunk before 
 your eyes. In front, and far out at sea, stretch- 
 ing beyond the horizon's edge, through the 
 stress of the dark and the night, down drives the 
 
 164 
 
fleet of the future, straight toward the rocks 
 which split and sink. Your vote must light the 
 signal, for rescue or for ruin. The good ships 
 wait for you. What shall the signal be, — false 
 lights to beckon, or a beacon to warn and save?" 
 
 As a trial lawyer Mr. Baker did not rely solely 
 upon the breadth and accuracy of his general 
 knowledge of the law, or upon the fertility of his 
 resources ; but he subjected the details of each 
 case to a thorough analysis and his preparation 
 for trial was painstaking and complete. In pre- 
 senting the evidence to the jury his method of 
 conducting the direct examination of his wit- 
 nesses was so gently persuasive and subtly 
 argumentative as to avoid objection on the part 
 of opposing counsel and when his testimony was 
 closed, the probative force of every fact was 
 understood by the jury, and often no closing 
 argument was required. As a cross-examiner, 
 probably no lawyer in the State was so greatly 
 feared and dreaded by all witnesses who were 
 tempted to prevarication and falsehood. Such 
 was the merciless power of his sarcasm and 
 ridicule, and his relentless pursuit of the witness 
 from point to point, that the mental torture of 
 his victim was often painfully manifest. 
 
 But however strong his personal conviction 
 might be that no argument was necessary, he 
 never faltered in his summing up to the jury in 
 important cases, but with an accurate and 
 almost intuitive perception of the legal principles 
 involved, with a splendid analysis and marvelous 
 
 165 
 
grasp of all the evidence, with superb expression 
 and confident assertion, with splendid rhetoric 
 and faultless logic, and with eloquence attuned 
 to the general harmony of effect, he strove to 
 carry conviction to the minds of the jury. In 
 complicated cases, he stalked with aggressive 
 courage across the devious ways of conflicting 
 details of testimony and safely took the main 
 avenue to the conclusion for which he contended. 
 Several of his arguments before the law court 
 were striking illustrations of the creative power 
 and expansive force of the principles of the 
 common law and their adaptability, in the hands 
 of a master, to new conditions in industrial and 
 social life. By thus aiding to establish what are 
 termed new rules of law, he has made valuable 
 contributions to the jurisprudence of Maine. 
 
 In 1885 he was elected attorney general of the 
 State, and no lawyer in Maine ever came to that 
 office with more admirable qualifications for the 
 proper and successful discharge of its duties. In 
 the prosecution of Stain and Cromwell upon the 
 charge of murder, his closing argument was a 
 masterpiece of analytical power and forensic 
 oratory, rarely if ever surpassed in New England 
 since the days of Webster and Choate. It is 
 scarcely an exaggeration to apply to him the 
 language recently employed by Mr. Dawson in 
 describing Edmund Burke. "He lifted the most 
 formidable burdens of thought with easy mas- 
 tery, probing their profoundest depths with 
 almost superhuman power and insight. "VVher\ 
 
 166 
 
once his imagination caught the flame, his whole 
 mind seemed to flow, hke molten ore. He 
 touched the supreme heights of thought, of 
 passion, of feeling, without an effort." 
 
 "Across his sea of mind 
 
 The thought came streaming like a blazing ship 
 
 Upon a mighty wind." 
 
 He possessed exceptional powers of mental 
 concentration and long sustained effort, and 
 with his great talents, keen discrimination, ripe 
 scholarship and extensive knowledge, with his 
 highly cultivated literary tastes and rare artistic 
 sense, he could not have failed to achieve dis- 
 tinction in any department of intellectual effort 
 to which the study of his life might have been 
 devoted. But he wisely chose for his life work 
 the study and practice of the great science of 
 human rights and social tranquility. With an 
 unsurpassed alertness of mind and imperturbable 
 self command, he was admirably equipped for 
 the contest of the forum and easily "beat a 
 pathway out to wealth and fame." He cherished 
 exalted conceptions of the honor of the legal 
 profession, the dignity of the law and the 
 sanctity of justice, and never failed to maintain 
 a respectful and courtly demeanor towards all 
 incumbents of the judicial office. Throughout 
 his professional career I think he never con- 
 sciously rendered any service or pursued any 
 course which was not in harmony with the 
 ethical canons of the profession and character- 
 
 167 
 
ized by good faith towards his opponents and 
 associates at the bar. 
 
 In apparent contrast to the aggressive and 
 controversial spirit of the court room, in all of 
 his personal and social relations Mr. Baker was 
 gentle and affable, kindly and unassuming. He 
 was apparently undismayed by unexpected ob- 
 stacles in the trial of a cause and when he left 
 the court house, he seemed to leave behind him 
 all the cares and anxieties of the day, and with a 
 buoyant spirit and a cheerful manner welcomed 
 the social converse of the evening. In the quiet 
 of his own home, surrounded by choice literature 
 and numerous works of art of which he was an 
 excellent judge, the most lovable qualities of his 
 mind and engaging attributes of his character 
 were illustrated. Among congenial friends, his 
 conversation was always enlivened with his own 
 genial wit and humor and embellished by literary 
 touches and an occasional reference to some 
 "quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." 
 But I never heard him express an unjust, unkind 
 or uncharitable thought respecting any person 
 within the circle of his acquaintances. He "had 
 no envy of another's fame "and his sleep was 
 never disturbed by the "laurels of Miltiades". 
 He was quick to appreciate and generous to 
 commend the ability and learning of others. 
 
 Although Mr. Baker never married, he was 
 fond of society and was never in any sense a 
 recluse. He had a keen zest for rambles over 
 the hilltops and through the "silent places" of 
 
 1 68 
 
the woodland near his own home, and for many 
 years had passed a portion of the long summer 
 days by the resounding sea. The lines of a 
 great poet appealed to him : 
 
 "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
 There is a rapture on the lonely shore. 
 There is society where none intrudes, 
 By the deep sea, and music in its roar, 
 I love not man the less, but nature more." 
 
 It is sometimes said that the fame of the 
 popular orator and of the advocate at the bar, 
 however brilliant in their day, is but transitory, 
 and that their triumphs soon become a fleeting 
 memory and tradition, often passing with the 
 generation that witnessed them. But the fame 
 of Orville Dewey Baker is secure. No eulogy 
 upon his life is required. He erected his own 
 enduring monument. The deep impress which 
 he made upon our jurisprudence and upon the 
 public and professional life of the State, will 
 perpetuate his memory to generations beyond 
 ours, and cause his name to be inscribed among 
 the highest on the roll of Maine's great lawyers, 
 powerful advocates and eloquent orators. 
 
 169 
 
Hon. L. C. Cornish 
 
 I doubt, if ever before in the history of this 
 county, the Bar has lost from its ranks within 
 the space of a few short months, four prominent 
 members, engaged in the active work of their 
 profession. Two of the number it has been my 
 good fortune to be intimatel)' associated with, 
 Brother Baker and Brother Titcomb. Mr. Justice 
 Whitehouse has in most fitting and discrimi- 
 nating terms spoken of Brother Baker and of the 
 exalted place in the profession which he deserv- 
 edly won. With all that he has said I most 
 cordially concur and to it I would add a single 
 personal word. As a student in the office of the 
 father, Joseph Baker, and son, Orville D, Baker, 
 for one year, associated in work with both for 
 three years and then in partnership with the son 
 for ten years more, I came to know them thor- 
 oughly and to recognize and appreciate the 
 strong points of their characters. Keener, more 
 logical, more comprehensive legal minds I have 
 never met, and for the opportunity and the 
 training afforded me by such association I shall 
 ever be grateful. At this time it is my plain 
 duty to make this recognition although it ma}- 
 seem somewhat of a digression from the topic 
 assigned me. 
 
 And yet the digression is not so great. The 
 
 170 
 
career of these two sons when taken in connec- 
 tion with the two fathers have run along Hnes 
 surprisingly parallel in many respects. Joseph 
 Baker was admitted to the Bar and signed his 
 name in that little book in the possession of the 
 clerk that is a treasure house of names, including 
 that of the present Chief Justice of the United 
 States, at the August Term, 1839. Samuel 
 Titcomb signed only three years later at the 
 August Term, 1842. Both ever after made this 
 city their home and after long and useful and 
 honorable professional careers, died in the har- 
 ness, the one in 1883 and the other in 1892. 
 Their sons were born within three months of each 
 other, the one on December 23, 1847, and the 
 other March 14, 1848, attended school together, 
 were graduated, the one at Bowdoin and the other 
 at Harvard and were admitted to the Bar within 
 eighteen months of each other, the one at the 
 March Term, 1872 and the other at the August 
 Term, 1873. Both ever after made this city 
 their home, and after an honorable professional 
 career passed away within four months of each 
 other, the one at the age of sixty years and eight 
 months and the other sixty years and one month. 
 The streams of life rarely move in such parallel 
 channels. 
 
 Like father, like son, is an old adage, that is 
 sometimes though not always true. In these 
 two cases the sons did inherit largely in mental 
 attributes, in temperament and predilections 
 from the fathers, and while Mr. Baker, senior, 
 
 171 
 
delighted most of all in the combat of actual 
 trials and the brilliant display of talent that the 
 court room affords, Mr. Titcomb, senior, pre- 
 ferred the more quiet lines, the work of the 
 office of the probate court and those close and 
 confidential relations with clients that exist on 
 the part of the counsellor, but not necessarily on 
 the part of the attorney at law. The sons 
 followed their fathers and stepped into the prac- 
 tice and the same kind of practice that the 
 elders had built up, and each in his sphere was a 
 success and an authority. 
 
 172 
 
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