to rejoice?

RUFUS CHOATE.

Mr. Choate's mind was so complex, peculiar, and original,--so foreign
in temperament and spirit to the more representative traits of New
England character,--so large, philosophic, and sagacious in vision
and survey of great questions, and so dramatic and vehement in their
exposition and enforcement,--so judicial and conservative in always
maintaining in his arguments the balance and relation of
interdependent principles, and so often in details marring the most
exquisite poetry with the wildest extravagancies of style,--so free
from mere vulgar tricks of effect, and so full of imaginative
tricksiness and surprises,--so mischievous, subtle, mysterious,
elusive, Protean,--that it is no wonder he has been more admired and
more misunderstood than any eminent American of his time. It was
because of these unaccustomed qualities of mind that matter-of-fact
lawyers and judges came slowly but surely to Mr. Webster's
conclusion, that he was "the most accomplished of American lawyers,"
whether arguing to courts or juries. In the same way, critically
correct but unimaginative scholars, who "can pardon anything but a
false quantity,"--who "see the hair on the rope, but not the rope,"
and detect minute errors, but not poetic apprehension,--admitted at
last the fulness and variety of his scholastic attainments. And
perhaps the finest tribute to the power and subtlety of his influence
was, that, to the last, juries, who began cases by steeling
themselves against it, and who ended by giving him their verdicts,
maintained that they were not at all influenced by him,--so profound,
so complete, and so unconscious had been the spell this man of genius
had woven around them.

When it is remembered that a great lawyer in the United States is
called upon (as he is not in England) to practise in all our courts,
civil and criminal, law, equity, and admiralty, and, in addition to
all the complicated questions between parties, involving life,
liberty, and property, arising therein, that he is to know and
discuss our whole scheme of government, from questions under its
patent laws up to questions of jurisdiction and constitutional
law,--it will be seen what a field there is for the exhibition of the
highest talents, and how few lawyers in the country can become
eminent in all these various and important departments of mental
labor. In their whole extent Mr. Choate was not only thoroughly
informed as a stude