William Dean Howells

“ Your instinct prophesied, after any signal event, that he must and would feel and think justly and clearly of it, and so, in your rare encounters, there was no time lost. I myself in my literary quality wasted little or none of it in trying to reach him in his historical quality of German revolutionist, Western politician, Northern general, American statesman, New York editor. I knew that these were all his genuine and characteristic phases, and no mere masks; and that a thousand deeds and words bore witness of his intense vitality in each. ”

“ I have no doubt that it will remain his chief monument, and that all his other actions, achievements, qualities, will show there like the inscriptions of some perfect shaft of marble or some speaking relief of bronze. There is no more important or delightful form of literature than that which has chosen this great man to be one of its most admirable exponents. ”

“ At a house whose site is now buried deep under the towering shape of a skyscraper, where sometimes we used to meet at dinner, there was once long talk, over the cigars and coffee in the host's library, about the soul, and its mystical share in mortality and its potentialities of immortality. ”

“ It is too easy to say that this was the feminine touch in his make-up; most men are born of women, especially great men; and the mothers of the race are nearly always present in the natures of the sons.
If you had Carl Schurz's acquaintance at all, and I have a notion that this did not voluntarily extend or continue much beyond the large bounds of his friendship, you could not fail of some expression of this quality in him. You found him more expressive, when it came to matters of feeling, than the born American, often far less the true American, is. ”

“ Perhaps he thought that evident enough in what he had done and been since he had become so much more an American than so many that were born so. But it must have been with a glow of joy that all who believe the highest possible of the lowliest conditions to find in those opening pages of his life-story the poem of humanity which the history of our own great men has made classic. It will not be well for the world when its best are its best born. Conquest, slavery, the subjection of the peoples, can still sometimes come from the palace ”

“ But he has done himself far greater honor, rendered himself loftier distinction by his fidelity to the tradition which seems the American tradition only because it is so familiar to us, but which time and again is the experience of the world everywhere. There is Washington and there is Hamilton, gently born and gently bred, but somehow the heart turns rather to Franklin and to Lincoln as of more hope for the common men “God made so many of.” ”

“ He never wholly lost it, but as age and the want of opportunity forbade him the exercise of his faith in men, there possibly crept upon him something of the pessimism which we are subject to if we must let our sympathies lie idle. ”

“ He must always have been, in the innumerable encounters of experience, what he has openly shown himself in his latest message, by far his greatest message, to the world, a man tender, even when apparently least regardful, of other men ”