Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/37

Rh instincts, sharpened by early struggles, and that sober appreciation of the realities and possibilities of the times which is forced upon men by a hard contact with the world. He judged life from the stillness of the student's closet and from his intercourse with the refined and elevated, and he acquired little of those experiences which might have dampened his zeal in working for his ideal aims, and staggered his faith in their realization. His mind loved to move and operate in the realm of ideas, not of things; in fact, it could scarcely have done otherwise. Thus nature and education made him an idealist—and, indeed, he stands as the most pronounced idealist among the public men of America.

He was an ardent friend of liberty, not like one of those who have themselves suffered oppression and felt the galling weight of chains; nor like those who in the common walks of life have experienced the comfort of wide elbow-room and the quickening and encouraging influence of free institutions for the practical work of society. But to him liberty was the ideal goddess clothed in sublime attributes of surpassing beauty and beneficence, giving to every human being his eternal rights, showering around her the treasures of her blessings, and lifting up the lowly to an ideal existence.

In the same ethereal light stood in his mind the Republic, his country, the law, the future organization of the great family of peoples.

That idealism was sustained and quickened, not merely by his vast learning and classical inspirations, but by that rare and exquisite purity of life, and high moral sensitiveness, which he had preserved intact and fresh through all the temptations of his youth, and which remained intact and fresh down to his last day.

Such was the man, when, in the exuberant vigor of manhood, he entered public life. Until that time he had