nsulting the fifteen volumes which Mr. Sumner has left behind him.

But the distinguished senator from Massachusetts was not himself an
historian; he was a close and painstaking student of history, as well as
a rigid and critical observer of current events. He kept himself
thoroughly posted in the progress of his generation, and possessed the
happy faculty of seeing things not alone as one within the circle of
events but as one standing outside and afar off. Consequently, his
orations, senatorial speeches, miscellaneous addresses, letters and
papers on current themes are not fraught with the transitory or
ephemeral character, so common to heated discussions in legislative
halls, but are singularly and as a whole among the grandest
contributions to national history and growth.

These volumes cover, as we have already remarked, the period extending
from 1845 to 1874, and they furnish a compendium of all the great
questions which occupied the attention of the nation during that time,
and which were discussed by him with an ability equalled by few and
excelled by none of the great statesmen who were his contemporaries. The
high position which Mr. Sumner so long and so honorably held as one of
the giant minds of the nation,--his intimate connection with and
leadership in the great measure of the abolition of slavery, and all the
great questions of the civil war and those involved in a just settlement
of the same, rendered it a desideratum that these volumes should be
published.

Aside from their value as contributions to political history, the works,
particularly the orations, of Mr. Sumner belong to the literature of
America. They are as far superior to the endless number of orations and
speeches which are delivered throughout the country as the works of a
polished, talented and accomplished author surpass the ephemeral
productions of a day. In one respect these orations surpass almost all
others, namely, in the elevation of sentiment, the high and lofty moral
tone and grandeur of thought which they possess. The one on the "True
Grandeur of Nations" stands forth of itself like a serene and majestic
image, cut from the purest Parian marble. There has been no orator in
our time, whose addresses approach nearer the models of antiquity,
unless it be Webster, whom Sumner greatly surpasses in moral tone and
dignity of thought.

The works of a statesman, so variously endowed, and who has treated so
_many_ subjects with such a