Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/28

 20 William D. Fenton. consigned to its last resting place on the shores of the distant Pacific." At that time McDougall and Latham were the California Senators, and Senator McDougall delivered an extended and finished address. He said: "He was a many-sided man. Will, mind, power, radiated from one center within him in all directions; and while the making of that circle, which, according to the dreams of old philosophy, would constitute a perfect being, is not within human hope, he may be regarded as one who at least il- lustrated the thought. His great powers cannot be attributed to the work of laborious years. They were not his achieve- ments. They were gifts, God-given. His sensations, m.em- ory, thought and action went hand in hand together with a velocity and power, which, if not always exciting admiration, compelled astonishment. * * * He was skilled in met- aphysics, logic and law. He might be called a master of history, and of all the literature of our own language. model of the Greek or Roman school, but one far better suited to our age and people. He was a master of dialectics, and possessed a power and skill in words which would have confounded the rhetoric of Gorgias, and demanded of the great master of dialectics himself the exact use of all his materials of wordy warfare." Senator Browning, of Hlinois, said: "Baker fell— as I think he would have preferred to fall, had he had the choice of the mode of death— in the storm of battle, cheering his brave followers on to duty in the service of his adopted country, to which he felt that he owed much; which he loved well, and had served long and faithfully. * * * He was a true, immovable, incorrupt- ible and unshrinking patriot. * * * Tq Senators who were his contemporaries here, and who have heard the melody of his voice, who have witnessed his powerful and impassioned bursts of eloquence, and felt the witchery of the spell that he has thrown upon them, it were vain for me to speak of his displays in this chamber. It is no disparage- ment to his survivors to say that he stood the peer of any gentleman on this floor in all that constitutes the able and skillful debater, and the classical, persuasive and enchanting orator."
 * * * He was an orator — not an orator trained to the