Story's place from time to time as lecturer in the Harvard Law School; also Professor Greenleaf's, who was absent, and edited during the years 1835 and 1836 Andrew Dunlap's Treatise on Admiralty Practice. Beyond this, his studies, arduous, incessant and thorough, ranged far and wide.
Truly a studious and laborious young man, who took the business of life earnestly in hand, determined to know something, and to be useful to his time and country.
But what he had learned and could learn at home did not satisfy his craving. In 1837 he went to Europe, armed with a letter from Judge Story's hand to the law magnates of England, to whom his patron introduced him as “a young lawyer, giving promise of the most eminent distinction in his profession, with truly extra ordinary attainments, literary and judicial, and a gentle man of the highest purity and propriety of character.”
That was not a mere complimentary introduction; it was the conscientious testimony of a great judge, who well knew his responsibility, and who afterwards, when his death approached, adding to that testimony, was frequently heard to say, “I shall die content, as far as my professorship is concerned, if Charles Sumner is to succeed me.”
In England, young Sumner, only feeling himself standing on the threshold of life, was received like a man of already achieved distinction. Every circle of a society ordinarily so exclusive was open to him. Often, by invitation, he sat with the judges in Westminster Hall. Renowned statesmen introduced him on the floor of the Houses of Parliament. Eagerly he followed the debates, and studied the principles and practice of parliamentary law on its maternal soil, where from the first seed corn it had grown up into a magnificent tree, in whose shadow a great people can dwell in secure enjoyment of their
