Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. 1837-1840. EUROPEAN JOURNEY. In these days of constant international travel it seems sadly out of proportion to devote a chapter of a great man's life to a single European trip; but this journey bears an exaggerated importance in that life. If you ask Mr. Sumner's contemporaries for the secret of his fame, they begin at once to speak of this journey. If you seek the source of much of his knowledge of men and affairs, you find it in those three years, and it often furnishes the explanation of things otherwise contradictory. It is astonishing how often the world at large dwells upon it in estimating the man. In December, 1837, Sumner sailed for Havre. It was necessary for him to borrow the five thousand dollars he spent upon this tour, — money afterward repaid by his mother from the estate, — and he went against the advice of his most valued friends. Judge Story felt that this was the end of the law for Sumner, and President Quincy contemptuously remarked that Europe would only send him home with a cane and a mustache. But the determination to go at any cost, and in face of all obstacles, only marked his characteristic sense of his own value, and his consequent invariable habit of considering everything around him in its relation to himself, — a characteristic sometimes thought the inevitable accompaniment of genius. A glance backward will place him before us more distinctly. Though only twenty-six years of age, he was the editor of several law-books, and for some years he had conducted a legal review. He was not only a professor at the Law School of Harvard University, but more than once he had taken the whole responsibility of that department, filling not unac- ceptably the place of Judge Story. Thus he was already an authority in his chosen profession, espe...