HIS DEATH ANNOUNCED. 371 the mighty spirit had thus peacefully abandoned its wasted tenement and soared on wings of light to the mansions of eternal rest. XXXVI. EULOGIES IN CONGRESS-FUNERAL HONORS. THE two Houses met at 12 o'clock, and the members were generally on their way to the Capitol when overtaken by the tidings of Mr. Clay's death. In the Senate, before the reading of its journal, Mr. Hunter, of Virginia, only said : "Mr. President, a rumor has been circulated that Henry Clay is dead. His colleague is absent, rendering the last sad offices. I therefore move that the Senate adjourn." The motion was agreed to, and the Senate adjourned. In the House, after the reading of the journals, Mr. Venable, of North Carolina, said:— "In consequence of the report—which may be true-that Henry Clay, the illustrious Senator from Kentucky, breathed his last at his lodgings a few moments since, I move that the House adjourn." This was carried without a division. Of the next day's proceedings in both Houses, I give the full and carefully corrected report of the The Globe. It is as follows: The anticipated formal annunciation of the death of Hon. Henry Clay brought together an unusual auditory. Members of the House intermingled with Senators; the representatives of foreign sovereigns paid the tribute of their presence; Cabinet Ministers, and Heads of Bureaux, and members of the Judiciary, clustered without the bar. Of the illustrious cotemporaries of the distinguished dead but few remain ; but one form attracted all eyes-the Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, sat there. The General-in-Chief of the Army, Major-General Scott, too, was present. Attorney-General Crittenden, long the colleague of the deceased; the Hon. Reverdy Johnson, a cotemporary in the Senate, and one of the Attorney-General's predecessors; and numerous others, as eminent for their eloquence and their genius, there contemplated the end of human greatness. The Chaplain to the Senate, the Rev. C. M. Butler, in his opening prayer, supplicated for the living; but he also offered Christian consolation by speaking hopefully of the dead, whose declining days were cheered by the Gospel dispensation. The Journal having been read, Mr. Underwood* rose and said: "Mr. President, I rise to announce the death of my colleague, Mr. Clay. He died at his lodgings, in the National Hotel of this city, at seventeen minutes past eleven o'clock yesterday morning, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. He expired with perfect composure, and without a groan or struggle. By his death, our country has lost one of its most eminent citizens and statesmen; and, I think, its greatest genius. I shall not detain the Senate by narrating the transactions of his long and useful life. His distin men. guished services as a statesman are inseparably connected with the history of his country. As representative and speaker in the other House of Congress, as senator in this body, as secretary of state, and as envoy abroad, he has, in all these positions, exhibited a wisdom and patriotism which have made a deep and lasting impression upon the grateful hearts of his countryHis thoughts and his actions have already been published to the world in written biography; in congressional debates and reports; in the journals of the two Houses; and in the pages of American history. They have been commemorated by monuments erected on the wayside. They have been engraven on medals of gold. Their memory will survive the monuments of marble and the medals of gold; for these are effaced and detay by the friction of ages. But the thoughts and actions of my late colleague have become identified with the immortality of the human mind, and will pass down from generation to generation as a portion of our national inheritance incapable of annihilation, so long as genius has an admirer, or liberty a friend. "Mr. President, the character of Henry Clay was formed and developed by the influence of our free institutions. His physical, mental, and moral faculties were the gift of God. That they were greatly superior to the faculties allotted to most men, can not be questioned. They were not cultivated, improved, and directed, by a liberal or collegiate education. His respectable parents were not wealthy, and had not the means of maintaining their children at college. Moreover, his father died when he was a boy. At an early period, Mr. Clay was thrown upon his own resources, without patrimony. He grew up in a clerk's office in Richmond, Virginia. He there studied law. He emigrated from his native State and settled in Lexington, Kentucky, where he commenced the practice of his profession before he was of full age. "The road to wealth, to honor, and fame, was open before him. Under our constitution and laws, he might freely employ his great faculties unobstructed by legal impediments, and unaided by exclusive privileges. Very * Joseph R. Underwood, (Whig), of Kentucky. EULOGY OF MR. UNDERWOOD. 373 soon, Mr. Clay made a deep and favorable impression upon the people among whom he began his career. The excellence of his natural faculties was soon displayed. Necessity stimulated him in their cultivation. His assiduity, skill, and fidelity, in professional engagements, secured public confidence. He was elected member of the Legislature of Kentucky, in which body he served several sessions prior to 1806. In that year he was elevated to a seat in the Senate of the United States. "At the bar and in the General Assembly of Kentucky, Mr. Clay first manifested those high qualities as a public speaker which have secured to him so much popular applause and admiration. His physical and mental organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding. His temperament ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance clear, expressive, and variable—indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment, with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear like the melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and flashing with coruscations of genius. His gestures and attitudes graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured, convinced, and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus. "No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher or der of excellence than those given to Mr. Clay. In the quickness of his perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed, he had few equals, and no superior. He was eminently endowed with a nice discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a moment everything out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm, in his own or the dress of others. He was a skillful judge of the form and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness of his keen faculty of observation which never overlooked anything. A want of neatness and order was offensive to him. He was particular and neat in his handwriting, and his apparel. A slovenly blot or negligence of any sort met his condemnation; while he was so organized that he attended to, and arranged little things to please and gratify his natural love for neatness, order, and beauty, his great intellectual faculties grasped all the subjects of jurisprudence and politics with a facility amounting almost to intuition. As a lawyer, he stood at the head of his profession. As a statesman, his stand at the head of the Republican Wig party for nearly half a century, establishes his title to preeminence among his illustrious associates. "Mr. Clay was deeply versed in all the springs of human action. He had read and studied biography and history. Shortly after I left college, I had occasion to call on him in Frankfort, where he was attending court, and well I remember to have found him with Plutarch's Lives in his hands. No one better than he knew how to avail himself of human motives, and all the circumstances which surrounded a subject, or could present them with more force and skill to accomplish the object of an argument. "Mr. Clay, throughout his public career, was influenced by the loftiest patriotism. Confident in the truth of his convictions and the purity of his purposes, he was ardent, sometimes impetuous, in the pursuit of objects which he believed essential to the general welfare. Those who stood in his way were thrown aside without fear or ceremony. He never affected a courtier's deference to men or opinions which he thought hostile to the best interests of his country; and hence he may have wounded the vanity of those who thought themselves of consequence. It is certain, whatever the cause, that at one period of his life Mr. Clay might have been referred to as proof that there is more truth than fiction in those profound lines of the poet : 'He who ascends the mountain-top shall find Its loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; He who surpasses or subdues mankind, Must look down on the hate of those below, And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.' But how "Calumny and detraction emptied their vials upon him. glorious the change! He outlived malice and envy. He lived long enough to prove to the world that his ambition was no more than a holy aspiration to make his country the greatest, most powerful, and best-governed on the earth. If he desired its highest office, it was because the greater power and influence resulting from such elevation would enable him to do more than he otherwise could for the progress and advancement-first of his own countrymen, then of his whole race. His sympathies embraced all. The African slave, the Creole of Spanish America, the children of renovated, classic Greece-all families of men, without respect to color or clime, found in his expanded bosom and comprehensive intellect a friend of their elevation and amelioration. Such ambition as that is God's implantation in the human heart for raising the down-trodden nations of the earth, and fitting them for regenerated existence in politics, in morals, and religion. "Bold and determined as Mr. Clay was in all his actions, he was, nevertheless, conciliating. He did not obstinately adhere to things impracticable. If he could not accomplish the best, he contented himself with the nighest approach to it. He has been the great compromiser of those political agitations and opposing opinions which have, in the belief of thousands, at different times, endangered the perpetuity of our Federal Government and Union. "Mr. Clay was no less remarkable for his admirable social qualities than for his intellectual abilities. As a companion, he was the delight of his friends; and no man ever had better or truer. They have loved him from the beginning, and loved him to the last. His hospitable mansion at Ashland was always open to their reception. No guest ever thence departed without feeling happier for his visit. But, alas! that hospitable mansion has already been converted into a house of mourning; already has intelligence of his death passed with electric velocity to that aged and now widowed lady who, for more than fifty years, bore to him all the endearing relations of wife, and whose feeble condition prevented her from joining him in this city, and soothing the anguish of life's last scene by those endearing attentions which no one can give so well as a woman and a wife. May God infuse into her heart and mind the Christian spirit of submission under her bereavement! It can not be long before she may expect a reünion in Heaven. A nation condoles with her and her children on account of their irreparable loss. REMARKS OF MR UNDERWOOD. 375 "Mr. Clay, from the nature of his disease, declined very gradually. He bore his protracted sufferings with great equanimity and patience. On one occasion he said to me that when death was inevitable and must soon come, and when the sufferer was ready to die, he did not perceive the wisdom of praying to be 'delivered from sudden death.' He thought under such circumstances the sooner suffering was relieved by death the better. He desired the termination of his own sufferings, while he acknowledged the duty of patiently waiting and abiding the pleasure of God. Mr. Clay frequently spoke to me of his hope of eternal life, founded upon the merits of Jesus Christ as a Savior; who, as he remarked, came into the world to bring life and immortality to light.' He was a member of the Episcopalian Church. In one of our conversations he told me that, as his hour of dissolution approached, he found that his affections were concentrating more and more upon his domestic circle-his wife and children. In my daily visits he was in the habit of asking me to detail to him the transactions of the Senate. This I did, and he manifested much interest in passing occurrences. His inquiries were less frequent as his end approached. For the week preceding his death, he seemed to be altogether abstracted from the concerns of the world. When he became so low that he could not converse without being fatigued, he frequently requested those around him to converse. He would then quietly listen. He retained his mental faculties in great perfection. His memory remained perfect. He frequently mentioned events and conversations of recent occurrence, showing that he had a perfect recollection of which was said and done. He said to me that he was grateful to God for continuing to him the blessing of reason, which enabled him to contemplate and reflect on his situation. He manifested, during his confinement, the same characteristics which marked his conduct through the vigor of his life. He was exceedingly averse to give his friends 'trouble,' as he called it. Some time before he knew it, we commenced waiting through the night in an adjoining room. He said to me after passing a painful day, 'perhaps some one had better remain all night in the parlor.' From this he time he knew some friend was constantly at hand ready to attend to him. "Mr. President, the majestic form of Mr. Clay will no more grace these Halls. No more shall we hear that voice which has so often thrilled and charmed the assembled representatives of the American people. No more shall we see that waving hand and eye of light, as when he was engaged in unfolding his policy in regard to the varied interests of our growing and mighty republican empire. His voice is silent on earth for ever. The darkness of death has obscured the lustre of his eye. But the memory of his services-not only to his beloved Kentucky, not only to the United States, but to the cause of human freedom and progress throughout the worldwill live through future ages, as a bright example, stimulating and encouraging his own countrymen and the people of all nations in their patriotic devotions to country and humanity. "With Christians, there is yet a nobler and a higher thought in regard to Mr. Clay. They will think of him in connection with eternity. They will contemplate his immortal spirit occupying its true relative magnitude among the moral stars of glory in the presence of God. They will think of him as having fulfilled the duties allotted to him on earth, having been regenerated by Divine grace, and having passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and reached an everlasting and happy home in that 'house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.' "On Sunday morning last, I was watching alone at Mr. Clay's bedside. |