pointed, disillusioned and heartbroken beyond the dream of despair. I saw that world-famous smile of William Howard Taft, which they said would never wear off, fade forever among the things that were. Warren G. Harding, as Senator, might still be in the land of the living. We were all so sure that the cold, calculating, imperturbable equanimity, the impenetrable stoicism, of Calvin Coolidge would be proof against the lethal draught, but now we know that a happy decade or mayhap a tranquil score of years were shorn from his span of life. One of the seven by reason of his superlative strength and his indomitable will survived a decade in the generous hope of again sacrificing himself upon that alluring altar, but before his dream came true he expired like a steed plunging back into his burning barn. I saw Herbert Hoover, too sensitive for such an office, grow old while I looked at him.

There are living six widows of former Presidents and the wife of the only ex-President, eloquent tribute to the eternal feminine and tragic evidence of Presidential mortality. Let no one deceive himself into believing that the present incumbent, in spite of all his playful laughter and gallant front, is not corroding under the acid of this enervating ordeal. We sigh, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," but no more uneasy than the head that is pillowed in that snowy palace at the other end of the Avenue. We speak of "the white light that beats upon a throne," but it is no whiter and not nearly so hot as that which flames about the Presidential chair. But this office confers immortality upon one's name, so scores of patriots surge to immolate themselves upon this alluring but fatal altar.

During the last holiday season I drove past that gleaming palace, with its noble portico aflame with a rainbow of Christmas lights, and I thought as I mused upon the somber shadows that lurked among its stately columns and hid in its classic corridors that we should write above those iron gates what is etched on the lintels of Dante's Inferno:

"Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate."

Shakespeare, in his tragedy of greatness, puts upon the lips of Marc Antony the naked truth concerning human greatness. Antonius was standing above the body of his assassinated friend and comrade, that "piece of bleeding earth," that pathetic clay that but yesterday was Julius Caesar, “whose word might have stood against the world." As he gazed upon this prostrate form he exclaimed: "O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?

Are all thy conquests glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?"

Massillon, delivering the funeral oration of Louis XIV in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, exclaimed. "Dieu, seul est grand"-God, alone, is great. Such is the tragedy of human grandeur. The old Romans had a lucid saying: "Sic transit gloria mundi"-so passes the glory of the world.

This service reminds us of the swift mutations of life. Nothing in life is permanent or static. Nature abhors both a vacuum and dull monotony. Life is a stream on whose bosom is etched everlasting change. The earth is full of life, music, beauty, and loveliness. But its beauty and loveliness do not last. It changes as swift as the wings of light:

"Beauty comes and beauty goes,

Like the petals of a rose.

Song is but a moment's bliss,

Fleeting as a lover's kiss.

Dawn's bright promise of a day,

Quickly crumbles in decay.

Spring is but an eerie, banshee light,
Vanishing in a burst of flight.

And in all this transiency,

Only God and hope remain to me."

The passing of these colleagues of ours brings into sharp relief not only the eternal change of all things but the mystery of death. Life, too, is quite as much a mystery. What is life with all its wondrous, mighty energies? Its definition and its source have escaped all our sages and philosophers. What is death? Only the poet can approach a definition. Nancy Byrd Turner has recently given her version and vision of death under the title, "Death Is a Door":

"Death is only an old door

Set in a garden wall.

On gentle hinges it gives, at dusk,

When the thrushes call.

"Along the lintel are green leaves,

Beyond, the light lies still;

Very weary and willing feet

Go over that sill.

"There is nothing to trouble any heart,

Nothing to hurt at all.

Death is only a quiet door

In an old wall."

But what a pitiable little span is human life. When viewed only from its troubled surface, what a strange and pathetic tragedy. Yesterday the warm, sweet current of life; today still in the chill of death. Yesterday the thrill and exhilaration of superiority and preeminence; today the democratic equality of the dust. Death, like love, "levels all rank." There is no caste in the dominion of the sepulcher. Death is the universal decree. The earth itself is but one vast mausoleum. We touch it not without desecrating a myriad sepulcher. The very rocks that wall us in are but the dusty archives of life that throbbed in dead and forgotten ages. All that lives must die.

"The hand of the king that the scepter hath borne,

The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn,
The eye of the sage and the heart of the brave,

Are hidden and lost in the depth of the grave."

But it has been said that there is no life without death. That death is the prophecy of life.

"Plato, thou reasonest well?

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

The longing after immortality.”

Bryant teaches us a beautiful lesson relative to the migratory bird:

"There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast

The desert and illimitable air

Lone wandering, but not loss.

"He who from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I shall tread alone,

Will guide my feet aright."

The bird that sunward guides its flight does not know that eternal summer laughs beneath the tropic sun. He has never seen the leaves that never fade nor felt the heat that never cools. His native home was where Arctic ice drove summer from the earth he knew. But in his little fluttering heart the Almighty had planted this cosmic urge to seek a land of everlasting summer; and when the bird arrives, there the summer is. Neither Nature nor Nature's God ever deceived their children.

I used to have a friend who was a great lawyer and a greater poet and philosopher, though he wrote all of his poetry in the form

of prose. In an essay discussing the conservation of energy and the well-known fact that always and everywhere in Nature nonextinction is her most imperious command: that matter and energy were indestructible and eternal. He tells it so much better than anyone else ever did, so I will quote briefly:

"Each meanest mote of matters' dust doth hide a king, divinity doth hedge. He may his venture's fashion change, or may put on the Gyges ring; he ne'er shall abdicate.

"Though worlds may crash and matter wreck, or seethe in flame with fervent heat, and seeming chaos come again, without a tremor, still enthroned, his royal plumage all unscathed, his power nor jot nor tittle 'bates.

"When comes the time, and come it shall, when seemingly this solid earth, yon flaming sun, and all that his wide eye beholds, in sheer vacuity dissolves his crown serene he still shall

wear, shall still his royal scepter wield."

If this mote of matter, Judge Keplinger's humble but regal grain of dust, shall survive the wreck of worlds, what shall we say of mind and soul and energy? Mind and energy are eternal. I am mind, I am energy! I am immortal!

I know of no better manner of concluding this faltering memorial to those of our number who have gone to the land of their dreams than by quoting a little poem by the great dramatic critic, William Winter. About a quarter of a century ago Mr. Winter was very ill and close to the gates of eternity. He recovered, however, and afterward wrote this poem, and, in my humble opinion, no sweeter honey of its kind has dripped from the hive of genius since Tennyson wrote The Crossing of the Bar. In the gentle faith of Him who walked by the tideless sea and in the calm philosophy of William Winter, as expressed in this poem, we can look toward the sunset trail with confidence and hope:

"One other bitter drop to drink,

And then-no more!

One little pause upon the brink,

And then-go o'er!

One sigh-and then the lib'rant morn

Of perfect day,

When my free spirit, newly born,

Shall soar away.

"One pang-and I shall rend the thrall

Where grief abides,

And generous Death shall show me all

That now he hides;

And, lucid in that second birth,

I shall discern,

What all the sages of the earth

Have died to learn.

"One motion and the stream is crost,
So dark, so deep!

And I shall triumph, or be lost,

In endless sleep,

Then onward whatsoe'er my fate,

I shall not care!

Nor sin nor sorrow, love nor hate

Can touch me there."

Mr. LAMBERTSON. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Hancock].

Mr. HANCOCK. Mr. Speaker, the sad news of the death of our beloved colleague, U. S. GUYER, brings to me a deep sense of personal loss as it does to all of you who were closely associated with him.

Judge GUYER first came to Congress to fill an unexpired term in the Sixty-eighth Congress. He returned in the Seventieth Congress to serve his district and his country for the rest of his life. I was also a Member of the Seventieth Congress. We were sworn in together in December 1927. For the past 10 or 12 years I have sat beside him on the Committee on the Judiciary. I feel that I knew him well, and I was proud to call him my friend.

He was deeply religious, intensely patriotic, a close student of history, a gifted speaker, an able and conscientious legislator and lawyer, a cultured Christian gentleman. He set high standards of rectitude for himself from which he never deviated, and yet he gazed upon his fellow men with kindly, tolerant, and friendly eyes. He was a delightful and stimulating companion. I shall miss him. It saddens me today to realize that we shall never see him again.

Mr. LAMBERTSON. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Celler].