OBITUARY ADDRESSES.

SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES,

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 1852.

After the reading of the Journal, Mr. UNDERWOOD rose, and addressed the Senate, as follows:

Mr. PRESIDENT: I rise to announce the death of my colleague, Mr. CLAY. He died at his lodgings, in the National Hotel of this city, at seventeen minutes past eleven o'clock yesterday morning, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. He expired with perfect composure, and without a groan or struggle.

By his death our country has lost one of its most eminent citizens and statesmen; and, I think, its greatest genius. I shall not detain the Senate by narrating the transactions of his long and useful life. His distinguished services as a statesman are inseparably connected with the history of his country. As Representative and Speaker in the other House of Congress, as Senator in this body, as Secretary of State, and as Envoy abroad, he has, in all these positions, exhibited a wisdom and patriotism which have made a deep and lasting impression upon the grateful hearts of his countrymen. His thoughts

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and his actions have already been published to the world in written biography; in Congressional debates and reports; in the Journals of the two Houses; and in the pages of American history. They have been commemorated by monuments erected on the wayside. They have been engraven on medals of gold. Their memory will survive the monuments of marble and the medals of gold; for these are effaced and decay by the friction of ages. But the thoughts and actions of my late colleague have become identified with the immortality of the human mind, and will pass down from generation to generation as a portion of our national inheritance, incapable of annihilation so long as genius has an admirer, or liberty a friend.

Mr. PRESIDENT, the character of HENRY CLAY was formed and developed by the influence of our free institutions. His physical, mental, and moral faculties were the gift of God. That they were greatly superior to the faculties allotted to most men cannot be questioned. They were not cultivated, improved, and directed by a liberal or collegiate education. His respectable parents were not wealthy, and had not the means of maintaining their children at college. Moreover, his father died when he was a boy. At an early period, Mr. CLAY was thrown upon his own resources, without patrimony. He grew up in a clerk's office in Richmond, Virginia. He there studied law. He emigrated from his native State

and settled in Lexington, Kentucky, where he commenced the practice of his profession before he was of full age.

The road to wealth, to honour, and fame, was open before him. Under our Constitution and laws he might freely employ his great faculties unobstructed by legal impediments, and unaided by exclusive privileges. Very soon Mr. CLAY made a deep and favourable impression upon the people among whom he began his career. The excellence of his natural faculties was soon displayed. Necessity stimulated him in their cultivation. His assiduity, skill, and fidelity in professional engagements secured public confidence. He was elected member of the Legislature of Kentucky, in which body he served several sessions prior to 1806. In that year he was elevated to a seat in the Senate of the United States.

At the bar and in the General Assembly of Kentucky, Mr. CLAY first manifested those high qualities as a public speaker which have secured to him so much popular applause and admiration. His physical and mental organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding. His temperament ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance clear, expressive, and variable-indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and

modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear like the melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and flashing with coruscations of genius. His gestures and attitudes graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured, convinced, and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.

No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher order of excellence than those given to Mr. CLAY. In the quickness of his perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed, he had few equals and no superior. He was eminently endowed with a nice discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a moment every thing out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm, in his own or the dress of others. He was a skilful judge of the form and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness of his keen faculty of observation which never overlooked