en now writing the annals of
God. Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal
thereto, would truly deserve that title that Homer bestows upon princes.
He would be the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old
Sinai, silent now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant
tourist, and crawled over by the hammer of the geologist, he must find
his tables of the new law here among factories and cities in this
wilderness of sin, called the progress of civilization, and be the
captain of our exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order."

Certain stanzas of Lowell, also, were quoted even more widely, and were
ever upon the lips of college students. Many a soldier boy who went to
battle from the forest and factory, the fields and the mines, scarcely
knew that his inspiration--like Phillip's oratory--was embodied in
Lowell's poem, "The Present Crisis":--

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,--
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."

Then came Charles Sumner, the scholar in politics, to make practical the
student's message. Daniel Webster's defense of Massachusetts in his
reply to Hayne, and his wonderful eloquence in the years which followed
that first great address, lifted the old Bay State into unique
preeminence in the Senate: when, therefore, Webster left the Senate and
entered the cabinet of Millard Fillmore, the North and the South alike
asked, with intense interest, who should succeed the defender of the
Constitution. That no dramatic interest might be lacking when, in 1851,
Charles Sumner entered the Senate chamber to take the oath of office, it
came about that Henry Clay, the great Compromiser, left the Senate,
going out at one door, on the very day that Conscience, in the person of
this Puritan, entered it by the other door. John C. Calhoun, inflexible,
iron to the end, adhering tenaciously t