Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/32

6 literature and history. Graduated in 1830, he entered the Cambridge Law School. Now life began to open to him. Judge Story, his most distinguished teacher, soon recognized in him a young man of uncommon stamp; and an intimate friendship sprang up between teacher and pupil, which was severed only by death.

He began to distinguish himself, not only by the most arduous industry and application, pushing his researches far beyond the text-books,—indeed, text-books never satisfied him,—but by a striking eagerness and faculty to master the original principles of the science, and to trace them through its development.

His productive labor began, and I find it stated that already then, while he was yet a pupil, his essays, published in the American Jurist, were “always characterized by breadth of view and accuracy of learning, and some times by remarkably subtle and ingenious investigations.” Leaving the Law School, he entered the office of a lawyer in Boston, to acquire a knowledge of practice, never much to his taste. Then he visited Washington for the first time, little dreaming what a theatre of action, struggle, triumph and suffering the National city was to become for him; for then he came only as a studious, deeply interested looker-on, who merely desired to form the acquaintance of the justices and practising lawyers at the bar of the Supreme Court. He was received with marked kindness by Chief Justice Marshall, and in later years he loved to tell his friends how he had sat at the feet of that great magistrate, and learned there what a judge should be.

Having been admitted to the bar in Worcester in 1834, when twenty-three years old, he opened an office in Boston, was soon appointed reporter of the United States Circuit Court, published three volumes containing Judge Story's decisions, known as Sumner's Reports, took Judge