Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,--
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."

Then came Charles Sumner, the scholar in politics, to make practical the
student's message. Daniel Webster's defense of Massachusetts in his
reply to Hayne, and his wonderful eloquence in the years which followed
that first great address, lifted the old Bay State into unique
preëminence in the Senate: when, therefore, Webster left the Senate and
entered the cabinet of Millard Fillmore, the North and the South alike
asked, with intense interest, who should succeed the defender of the
Constitution. That no dramatic interest might be lacking when, in 1851,
Charles Sumner entered the Senate chamber to take the oath of office, it
came about that Henry Clay, the great Compromiser, left the Senate,
going out at one door, on the very day that Conscience, in the person of
this Puritan, entered it by the other door. John C. Calhoun, inflexible,
iron to the end, adhering tenaciously to his doctrine of secession, had
just died, quite unconscious of the fact that his speeches held the
explosives that were to shatter the South and destroy half a million of
his beloved people. Clay, too, was death-stricken, and with great pathos
referred to himself as "a stag scarred by spears, worried by wounds,
dragging his mutilated body to his lair to lie down and die." Webster
was now gray and broken, with the shadow of the eclipse already drawing
near. In such a moment Charles Sumner began his career by an appeal to
the "everlasting yea" and the "everlasting nay."--"I desire to speak