t his chief gift and faculty is one which I can hardly
think of words to describe fitly. The few of his old friends
who are left will understand what I mean. But I can hardly
make those who did not know him, or live in his time, comprehend
it. That was his rare and unequalled gift of gathering and
uttering the sentiment of the people. When new and doubtful
matters of pith and moment were to be dealt with, and after
a long apparent hesitation, and backing and filling, and what
people who did not know him thought trembling in the balance,
he would at last make up his mind, determine on his action,
and strike a blow which had in it not only the vigor of his
own arm, but the whole vigor and strength of the public sentiment
which he had gathered and which he represented. He was an
ubiquitous person. He would travel all over the State, spending
the day, perhaps, in visiting forty shops and factories in
the neighborhood of Boston; then take a nine or ten o'clock
train at night and go up to Springfield, get in there at two
or three o'clock in the morning, call up out of bed some active
politician and tell him he had come to sleep with him; spend
the night in talking over the matter about which he was anxious
until six or seven o'clock in the morning (I do not believe
he ever slept much, either with anybody or alone), and then,
perhaps, up to Northampton or Greenfield to see some person
whom he called Tom, Dick, or Harry, but who knew the local
feeling there; and after a week or two spent in that way,
never giving his own opinion, talking as if he were all things
to all men, seeming to hesitate and hesitate and falter and
be frightened, so if you had met him and talked with him you
would have said, if you did not know him well, that there
was no more thought, nor more steadiness of purpose, or backbone
in him than in an easterly cloud; but at length, when the
time came, and he had got ready, the easterly cloud seemed
suddenly to have been charged with an electric fire and a
swift and resistless bolt flashed out, and the righteous
judgment of Massachusetts came from his lips.

With all his faults, Peace be to the ashes of Henry Wilson.
He was a leader and a tribune of the people. We do not seem
to have such leaders now-a-days. I liked Charles Sumner better.
But it was a great thing for Massachusetts, a great thing for
human liberty, and a great thing for Charles Sumner himself
that he had Henry Wilson as a friend and