"With such broken phrases as these, Mr. Chairman, perhaps not altogether just to the living, we endeavor to express the emotions natural to this hour of our bereavement. Talent, industry, eloquence, and learning, there are still, and always will be, at the bar of Boston. But if I say that the age of miracles has passed, that the day of inspiration is over,--if I cannot realize that in this place where we now are, the cloth of gold was spread, and a banquet set fit for the gods,--I know, sir, you will excuse it. Any one who has lived with him and now survives him, will excuse it;--any one who like the youth in Wordsworth's Ode,--
'--by the vision splendid Is on his way attended, At length ... perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.'"
It will also tend to secure justice to Mr. Choate's memory, if there be here recorded the statement by Judge Benjamin R. Curtis of the judgment of the men of Mr. Choate's own profession, as to the moral standards by which Mr. Choate was governed in his practice. Judge Curtis said in his address at the same meeting of the Boston Bar:--
"I desire, therefore, on this occasion and in this presence, to declare our appreciation of the injustice which would be done to this great and eloquent advocate by attributing to him any want of loyalty to truth, or any deference to wrong, because he employed all his great powers and attainments, and used to the utmost his consummate skill and eloquence, in exhibiting and enforcing the comparative merits of one side of the cases in which he acted. _In doing so he but did his duty. If other people did theirs, the administration of justice was secured._"
All the citations are from 'Addresses and Orations of Rufus Choate': copyrighted 1878, by Little, Brown and Company
THE PURITAN IN SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS LIFE
From Address Delivered at the Ipswich Centennial, 1834