II
A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortex
of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have lived
and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musical
studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As
it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel,
the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London
awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure.
There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too
accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he
never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims he
was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperament
and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.
He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and take
on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slavery
movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quickly
from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in the
Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping,
crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous and
corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a
Garfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the
Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction,
nowhere.
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