ther
American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes
outside of politics, and his lecture on the _Lost Arts_ was a favorite
with audiences of all sorts.

Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered politics
reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless leading of his
conscience. He was a student of literature and art; a connoisseur of
engravings, for example, of which he made a valuable collection. He
was fond of books, conversation, and foreign travel, and in Europe,
while still a young man, had made a remarkable impression in society.
But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as
Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. Thereafter he
remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress until slavery was
abolished. His influence throughout the North was greatly increased by
the brutal attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully
Brooks" of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat
labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been wittily said, to
be surveying a "broad landscape of his own convictions." His most
impressive qualities as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness
and his thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of his
parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech _On the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill_, of February 3, 1854, and _On the Crime against Kansas_, May 19
and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration on the _True
Grandeur of Nations_.

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. _Voices of the Night_. _The Skeleton
in Armor_. _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. _The Village Blacksmith_.
_The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems_ (1846). _By the Seaside_.
_Hiawatha_. _Tales of a Wayside Inn_.

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. _Elsie
Venner_. _Old Ironsides_. _The Last Leaf_. _My Aunt_. _The Music
Grinders_. _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_. _Nux Postcoenatica_. _A Modest
Request_. _The Living Temple_. _Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard
College_. _Homesick in Heaven_. _Epilogue to the Breakfast Table
Series_. _The Boys_. _Dorothy Q_. _The Iron Gate_.

3. James Russell Lowell. _The Biglow Papers_ (two series). _Under the
Willows, and Other Poems_ (1868). _Rhoecus_. _The Shepherd of King
Admetus_. _The Vision of Sir Launfal_. _The Present Crisis_. _The
Dandelion_. _The Birch Tree_. _Beaver Brook_. _Essays on Chaucer_.
_Shakespeare Once More_. _