The sorrow which I feel in his early death is partly a selfish grief, partly regret at his broken hopes now forever ended here, but beyond all the loss to my native State. We have many men in public life from Pennsylvania, but they are chiefly of the earth. We have many men who are capable and pure, but they have eaten of the Lotos, and the spear has dropped from their nerveless hands. With his strength and his ambition he could not have been kept from the national councils, but he is dead, and the fruits we were promised we shall never gather. Why Sumner was spared to Massachusetts until his work was done, why Calhoun was permitted to grow gray in the service of South Carolina, and our Brown, the peer of either, and more liberal than both, was snatched away in the green wood, is a question beyond our ken, but which repeats itself the more sadly, because we look in vain for one to fill his place.
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