After many delightful nights and days spent in searching for the vantage-ground of truth, our indefatigable student descended from that clearer, rarer, and more serene atmosphere which surrounds the exalted temple of the wise, to launch himself into the madding crowd, and, with spirit purged and mental vision clarified, to discern more distinctly "the errors and wanderings, and mists and tempests in the vale below."
Not only had he completed the course the Chief Justice had marked out, but he had also carefully reviewed from first to last all the civil-rights decisions. This tour of inspection seemed to him to lead through a bewildering maze of crooked passages lying underneath the Temple of Justice, where the bones of its illustrious dead were deposited. From this labyrinth it was next to impossible to extricate himself. But once free from the vague, crude, and superficial opinions, colored by the many-hued prejudices of sectional feeling displayed in the cases, and having made good his escape from the subterraneous passages which he styled the Funeral Departments of Justice, our student concentrated his energies on a close and steady pursuit of his object. He resolved to omit nothing essential to a clear understanding of civil rights; and, before reaching any conclusions of his own, he determined to consult all the available oracles of wisdom, and to present whatever truth he might glean from them to the consideration of the enlightened and statesmanlike understanding of the Chief Justice. He wisely concluded first to hold converse with the foremost thinkers, the real rulers of all nations, those calm and placid commanders who, when the strained masts begin to quiver, and its torn canvas flutters in the gale, safely guide the gallant ship of state through the winds and the waves of political factions.
In conversation with his familiar friends the student always spoke of the leaders of the press as the Napoleons of Peace, from whose proud dominions of intellect the winds of heaven daily scattered the seeds of science and truth, from which sprang trees of knowledge, like the banyan's branches, dropping shoots into the ground, and taking root only to bring forth new stocks, until their foliage encircled the globe. He thought always with the greatest reverence of that lofty race of solitary
