Rufus Choate. more how " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," and all that in them is. This book, so early absorbed and never forgotten, saturated his mind and spir it more than any other, more than all other books combined. It was at his tongue's end, at his ringer's ends — always close at hand until those last languid hours at Halifax, when it solaced his dying meditations. You can hardly find speech, argument or lecture of his from first to last, that is not sprinkled and studded with biblical ideas and pictures, and biblical words and phrases. To him the book of Job was a sublime poem; he knew the Psalms by heart, and dearly loved the prophets, and above all Isaiah, upon whose gorgeous imagery he made copious drafts. He pondered every word, read with most subtle keenness, and applied with hap piest effect. One day coming into the Craw ford House, cold and shivering — and you remember how he could shiver — he caught sight of the blaze in the great fireplace, and was instantly warm before the rays could reach him, exclaiming, " Do you remember that verse in Isaiah, 'Aha! I am warm. I have seen the fire'?" and so his daily con versation was marked. And upon this solid rock of the Scriptures he built a magnificent structure of knowl edge and acquirement, to which few men in America have ever attained. History, philosophy, poetry, fiction, all came as grist to his mental mill. But with him, time was too precious to read any trash : he could winnow the wheat from the chaff at sight, almost by touch. He sought knowledge, ideas for their own sake, and for the lan guage in which they were conveyed. I have heard a most learned jurist gloat over the purchase of the last sensational novel, and have seen a most distinguished bishop greedily devouring the stories of Gaboriau one after another, but Mr. Choate seemed to need no such counter-irritant or blister, to draw the pain from his hurt mind. Busi ness, company, family, sickness — nothing
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could rob him of his one hour each day in the company of illustrious writers of all ages. How his whole course of thought was tinged and embellished with the reflected light of the great Greek orators, historians and poets; how Roman history,, fresh in his mind as the events of yesterday, supplied him with illustrations and supports for his own glowing thoughts and arguments, all of you who have either heard him or read him know. But it was to the great domain of English literature that he daily turned for fireside companions, and really kindred spirits. As he said in a letter to Sumner, with whom his literary fraternity was at one time very close : " Mind that Burke is the fourth Eng lishman, — Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Burke "; and then in one of those dashing outbursts of playful extravagance, which were so characteristic of him, fearing that Sumner, in his proposed review, might fail to do full justice to the great ideal of both, he adds: " Out of Burke might be cut 50 Mackintoshes, 175 Macaulays, 40 Jeffreys and 250 Sir Robert Peels, and leave him greater than Pitt and Fox together." In the constant company of these great thinkers and writers he revelled, and made their thoughts his own; and his insatiable memory seemed to store up all things committed to it, as the books not in daily use are stacked away in your public library, so that at any moment, with notice or without, he could lay his hand straightway upon them. What was once imbedded in the gray matter of his brain did not lie buried there, as with most of us, but grew and flourished and bore fruit. What he once read he seemed never to forget. This love of study became a ruling pas sion in his earliest youth. To it he sacrificed all that the youth of our clay — even the best of them — consider indispensable, and especially the culture and training of the body; and when we recall his pale face, worn and lined as it was in his later years,
