intellect plainly grew to the day of his death.  We would point to those two speeches as giving some adequate expression of his ability to treat large subjects simply, profoundly, artistically, and convincingly.  Many of his earlier and some of his later speeches and addresses, though large in conception and stamped with unmistakable genius, want solid body of thought, and are, so to speak, too fluid in style.  This obviously springs from the qualities of mind and from the circumstances we have indicated.  In court, the necessities of his case and the determination and shaping of all his argument and persuasion to convincing twelve men, or a court only, on questions requiring prompt decision, kept his style free from everything foreign to his purpose.  But, released from these restraints, and called upon for a treatment more general and comprehensive than acute and discriminating, his style often became inflamed and decorated with sensibility and fancy.  His mind, moreover, was overtasked in his profession.  His unremitting mental labor in the preparation and trial of so many cases was immense and exhausting.  It shortened his life.  That his genius might have that free and joyous exercise necessary to its full use and exhibition in literary or political directions, an abandonment of a great part of his professional duties was indispensable.  This was to him neither possible nor desirable.  The mental heat and pressure, therefore, under which he wrote his speeches and addresses, and the necessity for the exercise of different methods of thought and treatment from those called into play at the bar, explain why (with a few noble exceptions) they do not give a fair or full exhibition of his genius and accomplishments.  But in them his judgment never lost its anchorage.  Unlike Burke, who was the god of his political idolatry, his sensibility never overmastered his reasoning.  Through a style sometimes Eastern in flush and fervor, and again tropical in heat and luxuriance, were always seen the adjusting and attempering habit of thought and argument and the even balance of his mind.

We have said that his interest in politics was a patriotic interest in the nation.  He knew her history and her triumphs and reverses on land and sea by heart.  Though limited by no narrow love of country, he felt from sentiment and imagination that attachment to every symbol of patriotism and national power which makes the sailor suffer death with joy when he sees his country’s flag floating in the smoke of victory.  “The radiant ensign of the Republic” was to him the living embodiment of her honor and her power.  He had for it the pride and passion of the boy, with the prophetic hopes of the patriot.  Men of genius are ever revivifying the commonplace expressions and visible signs of popular enthusiasm with the poetic and historic realities which gave them birth.  He felt the glow and impulse of the great sentiments of race and nationality in all their natural simplicity and poetic force.  It is not