Born at Salisbury (Franklin), N. H., Jan. 18, 1782: died at Marshfield, Mass., Oct. 24, 1852. A famous American statesman, orator, and lawyer. He studied at Exeter Academy and Boscawen, New Hampshire; graduated at Dartmouth College in 1801; was admitted to the bar at Boston in 1805; practised law at Boscawen and Portsmouth; was Federalist member of Congress from New Hampshire 1813–1817; and removed to Boston in 1816. He acquired a national reputation as a lawyer in the Dartmouth College case in 1818; was member of Congress from Massachusetts 1823–27; was Whig United States senator from Massachusetts 1827–41; became famous for his constitutional speeches in reply to Hayne in 1830, and in opposition to Calhoun in 1833; opposed Jackson on the United States Bank question; received several electoral votes for President in 1836; and was an unsuccessful candidate for the Whig nomination in later years. In 1839 he visited Europe. He was secretary of State 1841–43; negotiated the Ashburton treaty with Great Britain 1842; was United States senator from Massachusetts 1845–50; opposed the Mexican war and the annexation of Texas; supported Clay’s compromise measures in his “7th of March speech” in 1850; was secretary of state 1850–52; and was again candidate for the Whig nomination for President in 1852. His chief public speeches (aside from those made in Congress and at the bar) are addresses delivered on the anniversary at Plymouth in 1820, on the laying of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill monument in 1825, on the deaths of Jefferson and Adams in 1826, on the dedication of Bunker Hill monument in 1843, and on the laying of the corner-stone of the addition to the Capitol in 1851.

Personal

  He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in Yankeeland! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:—I have not traced as much of silent Berserkir-rage, that I remember of, in any other man. “I guess I should not like to be your nigger!”—Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not English in breeding; a man worthy of the best reception from us; and meeting such, I understand.

  Now those thirsty eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those fatal perceptions, have fallen full on the great forehead which I followed about all my young days, from court-house to senate-chamber, from caucus to street. He has his own sins no doubt, is no saint, is a prodigal. He has drunk his rum of Party too so long, that his strong head is soaked, sometimes even like the soft sponges, but the “man’s a man for a’ that.” Better, he is a great boy,—as wilful, as nonchalant and good-humored. But you must hear him speak, not a show speech which he never does well, but with cause he can strike a stroke like a smith. I owe to him a hundred fine hours and two or three moments of Eloquence. His voice in a great house is admirable. I am sorry if you decided not to visit him. He loves a man, too. I do not know him, but my brother Edward read law with him, and loved him, and afterwards in sick and unfortunate days received the steadiest kindness from him.

  Daniel Webster dined with me on his own invitation. He was on his way to Morristown and to Sussex County to meet a gathering of the Whigs. Dr. Condit, of Morristown, dined with me. Mr. Collins dined here. It was a very interesting party, and Mr. Webster charmed the party. He is 57 years old, and looks worn and furrowed; his belly becomes protuberant, and his eyes deep in his head. I sympathize with his condition. He has been too free a liver. He ate but little and drank wine freely.

  A column indeed, stately and graceful with its Corinthian capital, gives no bad idea of Mr. Webster; of his tall and muscular person, his massive features, noble head, and the general expression of placid strength by which he is distinguished. This is a mere fanciful comparison; but Sir Augustus Callcott’s fine figure of Columbus has been reckoned very like him; a resemblance that must have been fortuitous, since the picture was painted before the artist had even seen the celebrated orator. When in England some ten or twelve years ago, Mr. Webster’s calm manner of speaking excited much admiration and perhaps a little surprise, as contrasted with the astounding and somewhat rough rapidity of progress which is the chief characteristic of his native land. And yet that calmness of manner was just what might be expected from a countryman of Washington, earnest, thoughtful, weighty, wise. No visitor to London ever left behind him pleasanter recollections, and I hope that the good impression was reciprocal. Everybody was delighted with his geniality and taste; and he could hardly fail to like the people who so heartily liked him.

  Dipped here and there into “Faust” (Anna Swanwick’s translation), and am admitted more intimately than by Hayward’s or Anster’s version into the subtleties of the modern Satan, the world-spirit of the nineteenth century. Our devil has partaken of the cosmopolitan culture; he, too, is a scholar and a gentleman, scarcely distinguishable in a crowd from any mortal else,—his complexion sallower by a shade, perhaps, and, if surveyed closely, some show of hoofs in his boots…. Faust’s dealings with him are infinitely suggestive and profitable, and inclusive of the whole range of guile. “The demon sat gladly,”—the portrait is sketched by a master, and is exhaustive of the subject. Goethe knew too much to paint well anything else; and this, his masterpiece, remains as the last likeness, finished up to the latest dates. Yet he lived too early to sketch this Western democratic shape, some fifty or more years later. Apropos of him, just now and here in this Western hemisphere everybody is putting down the dark Webster as the latest and best devil, concrete and astir in space perhaps,—certainly in these American parts,—clearly responsible for the sins of cities, North and South,—a Satan of national type and symmetry. ’Tis a great pity that Goethe should have come too soon. Head, shoulders, all, all of Webster should have gone into the picture, and this legal, logical, constitutional Mephistopheles of the States had justice done him by his master.

  In his personal appearance Mr. Webster was an extraordinary man, and at the age of forty was considered the handsomest man in Congress. He was above the ordinary size, and stoutly formed, but with small hands and feet, had a large head, very high forehead, a dark complexion, large black, deeply sunken, and solemn-looking eyes, black hair (originally), very heavy eyebrows, and fine teeth. To strangers his countenance appeared stern, but when lighted up by conversation, it was bland and agreeable. He was slow and stately in his movements, and his dress was invariably neat and elegant; his favorite suit for many years having been a blue or brown coat, a buff vest, and black pantaloons. His manner of speaking, both in conversation and debate, was slow and methodical, and his voice generally low and musical, but when excited, it rang like a clarion.

	We called him giant, for in every part
	He seemed colossal; in his port and speech,
	In his large brain and in his larger heart.
	And when his name upon the roll we saw
	Of those who govern, then we felt secure,
	Because we knew his reverence for the law.
	So the young master of the Roman realm
	Discreetly thought, we cannot wander far
	From the true course, with Ulpian at the helm.
	*        *        *        *        *
	We have no high cathedral for his rest,
	Dim with proud banners and the dust of years;
	All we can give him is New England’s breast
	To lay his head on,—and his country’s tears.

  Consider that from the day he went upon the Committee of Foreign Relations, in 1813, in time of war, and more and more, the longer he lived and the higher he rose, he was a man whose great talents and devotion to public duty placed and kept him in a position of associated or sole command; command in the political connexion to which he belonged, command in opposition, command in power; and appreciate the responsibilities which that implies, what care, what prudence, what mastery of the whole ground—exacting for the conduct of a party, as Gibbon says of Fox, abilities and civil discretion equal to the conduct of an empire. Consider the work he did in that life of forty years—the range of subjects investigated and discussed; composing the whole theory and practice of our organic and administrative politics, foreign and domestic…. How much then, when rising to the measure of a true, and difficult, and rare greatness, remembering that he had a country to save as well as a local constituency to gratify, laying all the wealth, all the hopes, of an illustrious life on the altar of a hazardous patriotism, he sought and won the more exceeding glory which now attends—which in the next age shall more conspicuously attend—his name who composes an agitated and saves a sinking land—recall this series of conduct and influences, study them carefully in their facts and results—the reading of years—and you attain to a true appreciation of this aspect of his greatness—his public character and life.

	No gloom that stately shape can hide,
	No change uncrown his brow; behold!
	Dark, calm, large-fronted, lightning-eyed,
	Earth has no double from its mould.

  I have looked on many mighty men,—King George, the “first gentleman in England;” Sir Astley Cooper, the Apollo of his generation; Peel, O’Connell, Palmerston, Lyndhurst,—all nature’s noblemen; I have seen Cuvier, Guizot, Arago, Lamartine, marked in their persons by the genius which has carried their names over the world; I have seen Clay, and Calhoun and Pinckney, and King, and Dwight, and Daggett, who stand as high examples of personal endowment in our annals; and yet not one of these approached Mr. Webster in the commanding power of their personal presence. There was a grandeur in his form, an intelligence in his deep, dark eye, a loftiness in his expansive brow, a significance in his arched lip, altogether beyond those of any other human being I ever saw.

  Accordingly, at noon on Friday, the 29th day of October, 1852, the gates of his late residence were thrown wide, that all who wished might come to look for the last time upon that majestic form. The coffin was placed upon the lawn, in front of the mansion-house, and a rich autumn sun poured down upon it the full light of day. A concourse of more than ten thousand filled the grounds, and passed slowly around the bier, each one pausing for an instant, to take the last look of that gracious figure, which was arrayed for burial in the same well-known dress that he had always worn. The great multitude present represented or comprehended all classes, all ages, all stations, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, from far and near. But, in that crowd, there came one unknown man, in a plain and rustic garb, who truly and fitly, because in homeliest words, interpreted the thoughts that silently oppressed them all, when, looking down upon the face of the dead, he said, as if for himself alone: “Daniel Webster, the world, without you, will seem lonesome.”

  I was intimate and in frequent correspondence with another American of still higher eminence, Daniel Webster; a man whom Sydney Smith aptly described as a “steam-engine in trousers.” His massive forehead indeed strikingly betokened the massive intellect that lay within. He belonged to the higher and earlier class of American Statesmen; though falling upon times when political partisanship and election trading had usurped so largely on the original institutions of the Republic, that he, as well as his contemporaries Clay and Calhoun, were excluded from its highest office because they signally deserved it. I am half inclined to believe that the civil war might have been averted, had Webster’s genius and masculine eloquence, as they at one time existed, placed him in a position where they could be of national avail.

  He did not “let himself out,” and display his lighter, frolicsome, and humorous moods, except in presence of those whom he had known long and well, and between whom and himself there existed strong mutual attachment. Those who did know him as he was, however, were aware that not only was he simple in manners, and often boyish in spirits; not only was he hearty, hospitable, and affectionate, steadfast in his love of his family and his attachment to his friends, kind of heart towards men and towards animals, courteous to his adversaries, courageous, benevolent,—but that he was also fond of fun, and had a very keen zest for, and sense of, the humorous.

  I was very fond of Mr. Webster, with his sweet and tender smile, his very white teeth, and his dark complexion and heavy brows. He was fond of children, and was very kind to me.

  He was the “godlike Daniel” to his countrymen in general, who thus called him by a phrase which, with a certain semi-conscious humor in it racy of the national character, redeemed its own excess of veneration by a corrective dash of associated familiarity. But no less the educated men among his fellows were accustomed to employ in their own more scholarly way a similar language. To them he was “Jove,” a “descended god,” a “demi-god,” “the Olympian.” If he went abroad, some Englishmen said he “looked like a cathedral,” or Sydney Smith, with irreverent homage to his Titan might, said he “was a steam-engine in breeches.” This imposing effect of Webster’s personal presence was partly due to the remarkable physical mold in which he was cast. He was not gigantic in proportions, was not even greatly above the medium height; but somehow the beholder took from him an instantaneous and overwhelming impression of immense mass, weight, momentum,—in one word, of power. He was always one of the sights of Boston, where his presence in the streets made the neighboring buildings look smaller. Men from the country, that did not know who it was, would stand to gaze at him.

  A congenial marriage seems to be essential to the best development of a man of genius, and this blessing rested upon that household. It was like organ-music to hear Webster speak to or of the being upon whom his affections reposed, and whom, alas! he was so soon to lose. I am sure that those who knew the man only when this tenderest relation had been terminated by death, never knew him in his perfect symmetry. Whatever evil-speakers might choose to say about the subsequent career of Daniel Webster, he was at that time [1826], “whole as the marble, founded as the rock.” He was on the happiest terms with the world, which had crowned him with its choicest blessing, and stood forth in all respects as an example and a hero among men…. Without asking the reason, men once subjected to his spell were compelled to love, to honor, and (so some cynics would wish to add) to forgive him. No man of mark ever satisfied the imagination so completely. The young men of to-day who go to Washington find a city of luxurious appointments and noble buildings, very different from the capital of muddy streets and scattered houses with which I was familiar. But where is the living figure, cast in heroic mould, to represent the ideal of American manhood? Can the capital of to-day show anything so majestic and inspiring as was Daniel Webster in the Washington of 1826?

  When Mr. Webster failed it was a moral failure. His moral character was not equal to his intellectual force. All the errors he ever committed, whether in public or in private life, in political action or in regard to money obligations, came from moral weakness. He was deficient in that intensity of conviction which carries men beyond and above all triumphs of statesmanship, and makes them the embodiment of the great moral forces which move the world. If Mr. Webster’s moral power had equalled his intellectual greatness, he would have had no rival in our history…. He stands to-day as the pre-eminent champion and exponent of nationality. He said once, “there are no Alleghanies in my politics,” and he spoke the exact truth. Mr. Webster was thoroughly national. There is no taint of sectionalism or narrow local prejudice about him. He towers up as an American, a citizen of the United States in the fullest sense of the word. He did not invent the Union, or discover the doctrine of nationality. But he found the great fact and the great principle ready to his hand, and he lifted them up, and preached the gospel of nationality throughout the length and breadth of the land. In his fidelity to this cause he never wavered nor faltered.

  Huge and solemn as were his eyeballs, vast and capacious as was his skull, massive as were his shoulders, and sonorous as was his voice, there was yet occasionally something deprecating in his manners and apologetic in his discourse. These deficiencies for championship were due to the influence of Puritanism, which had done its work upon him in his youth.

  As an infant he is described as a crying baby who worried his parents considerably. He grew up to boyhood pale, weak, and sickly; as he himself often told me, he was the slimmest in the family. And yet, by doing a boy’s work on his father’s farm, by indulging a propensity for outdoor sports, by leading a temperate and frugal life, he succeeded in building up a robust constitution. On arriving at manhood he had a physical frame which seemed made to last a hundred years. It was an iron frame, large and stately, with a great mountain of a head upon it. When Thorwaldsen, the Danish sculptor, saw his head in Powers’s studio in Rome, he exclaimed: “Ah! a design for Jupiter, I see.” He would not believe that it was a living American. Parker describes him as “a man of large mold, a great body, and a great brain…. Since Socrates there has seldom been a head so massive, huge. Its cubic capacity surpassed all former measurements of mind. A large man, decorous in dress, dignified in deportment, he walked as if he felt himself a king. Men from the country who knew him not stared at him as he passed through our streets. The coal-heavers and porters of London looked on him as one of the great forces of the globe. They recognized in him a native king.” Carlyle called him “a magnificent specimen whom, as a logic fencer or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back at sight against all the world.” And Sydney Smith said he was “a living lie, because no man on earth could be as great as he looked.”

  The fame of Whitfield rests entirely on his oratorical genius; his published sermons show a mind below mediocrity. But Webster’s speeches read with a clearness, an argumentative force, a grasp of thought, a magnificence of style, that indicate unusual intellectual powers. In his time Webster stood at the head of the American Bar; as a lawyer he was the peer of Jeremiah Mason. The cases he argued and won are among the most remarkable of the century. In his legal arguments he exhibited a power to deal with details, and to search out and win on the essential points of a case, while displaying great fairness in considering both sides of the argument. His fame was secure both as an orator and a lawyer when Destiny summoned him to display yet another phase of his many-sided genius in the councils of the nation. We have had many orators, many great lawyers and jurists, but very few statesmen of the first order, or for that matter of any degree of merit; politicians in abundance, but rarely statesmen. Among those characters who have achieved that high eminence, Daniel Webster occupies no second place.

  There is hardly a scrap of self-applause to be found in Webster’s career,—not even in the Boswellian “Reminiscences” of Peter Harvey. Of course Webster knew that all the world never estimated him at any less than the equal of the greatest men of his day, whether at the Bar or in the Senate, but he seems to have been absolutely clear of all vanity.

  Mr. Webster was the only man I ever knew or heard of who united in himself the highest qualities of an advocate, orator and debater. He has never been excelled, if equalled, in making difficult and intricate questions intelligible to jurors. Seeing clearly the real points at issue, and using language that anybody could understand, his statements of the points at issue were arguments. He never permitted the minds of jurors to be diverted from the real question upon which a case turned. Brushing aside everything that was not essential, the strong points only were presented by him, and those with exceeding clearness.

  A friend of mine once gave the proprietor of the Astor House, for courtesies extended to him, a dozen of his finest Maderia. He had the curiosity years after to ask his host of the Astor what became of this wine. He replied, “Daniel Webster came to my house, and I opened a bottle of it for him, and he remained in the house until he had drunk up every drop of it.” This was the famous “Butler 16.”

  Looking back upon the time in which he lived, it [we] beholds the statuesque form towering with strange grandeur among its contemporaries, huge in his strength, and huge also in its weakness and faults; not indeed an originator of policies or measures, but a marvelous expounder of principles, laws, and facts, who illumined every topic of public concern he touched, with the light of a sovereign intelligence and vast knowledge; who, by overpowering argument, riveted around the Union unbreakable bonds of constitutional doctrine; who awakened to new life and animated with invincible vigor and national spirit; who left to his countrymen and to the world invaluable lessons of statesmanship, right, and patriotism, in language of grand simplicity and prodigiously forceful clearness; and who might stand as its greatest mind in the political history of America, had he been a master character as he was a master mind.

  He of all men next to Napoleon deserved the title of magnetic. His powerful face, so often described, so characterized by Carlyle, Macaulay, and Sydney Smith, was capable of the most lustrous and winning and beautiful smile I can remember. Had Mr. Webster been, like Charles James Fox, a professional lady-killer, he would have won every woman in the land. But I never heard that he went into the business of flirtation at all.

Orations

  It is the effort of a great mind, richly stored with every species of information. If there be an American who can read it without tears, I am not that American. Mr. Burke is no longer entitled to the praise—the most consummate orator of modern times. What can I say of what regards myself? To my humble name “Exegisti monumentum ære perennius.” The oration ought to be read at the end of every century.

  Considered merely as literary productions, we think the three volumes of “Speeches and Forensic Arguments,” quoted at the head of this article, take the highest rank among the best productions of the American intellect.

  I admire your style of address. It is stringent and terse, simple and strong. It is the severe simplicity and strength of Demosthenes, and not the art and elegance and Copia verborum of Cicero. The latter was the characteristic of the speeches and writings of our friend Story. But yours is the better model for a great political speaker.

  Notwithstanding our admiration of Mr. Webster’s talents, we do not precisely place him at the head of the list of American orators. He wants the pathos of Preston, the electric rapidity of Calhoun, and the versatile graces and manifold excellences of Clay. But in massive volume of thought, in depth and closeness of reasoning, and in the eloquence of the head, he is scarcely equalled, certainly not surpassed, by any. This is his forte, and it manifests itself on all occasions, whether he is called on to defend the Union and the Constitution, or to vindicate his own State of Massachusetts. With him the flowers of rhetoric and appeals to feeling are but secondary things; he uses them with considerable effect, when they come in his way, but he would not move one step from his path to cull all the flowers of a whole parteere.

  The best speeches of Webster are among the very best that I am acquainted with in the wide range of oratory, ancient or modern. They have always appeared to me to belong to that simple and manly class which may be properly headed by the name of Demosthenes. Webster’s speeches sometimes brings before my mind the image of the Cyclopean walls,—stone upon stone, compact, firm, and grand. After I had perused, and aloud, too, the last speech which you sent me, I was desirous of testing my own appreciation, and took down Demosthenes, reading him aloud too. It did not lessen my appreciation of Webster’s speech. You know that I insist upon the necessity of entire countries for high, modern citizenship; and all my intercourse with Webster made me feel that the same idea or feeling lived in him, although he never expressed it. Webster had a big heart,—and for that very reason was a poor party leader in our modern sense. Everything in Webster was capacious, large; he was a statesman of Chatham’s type, I think. I believe he thought he was strong in political economy, but I think this was his weak point. I do not recollect that he was ever profound in that branch of statesmanship; and he may have become occasionally in this branch a special pleader, which he never was on other questions, and which many others have almost always been in their public career.

  He was the Chatham of the New World.

  In debate Webster was quick at retort. If it was a personal insult that aroused the slumbering lion, his roar of rage was appalling, and the spring and death-blow that followed, were like lightning in their suddenness. But it was on momentous occasions, when great public interests were at stake, that the full might of his intellect was visible. When feebler men, awed by the darkness of the political sky, fled for shelter from the tempest, he rushed forth exultingly to the elemental war, with all his faculties stimulated to their utmost. When the thunders of Nullification muttered in the distance, he coolly watched the coming storm; and when they burst, he bared his head to the bolts, like the mammoth of tradition, shaking them off as they fell. No man ever spoke, in whose utterances, even the simplest, the power of great personality was more deeply felt.

  In the Senate and in occasional speeches he was at his best, and above any other American of whom we have sufficient means of judging…. Webster has passed into history as one of the handful of men whom the world acknowledges as the great masters of eloquence.

  Upon the exterior of the Sanders Theatre of Harvard University—the oratorical centre of the oldest American college—are seven sculptured heads of the greatest orators of the world, who, according to this selection, are Demosthenes the Greek, Cicero the Roman, St. Chrysostom the Syrian, Bossuet the Frenchman, Chatham and Burke the Englishmen, and Daniel Webster the American. The choice is a fit one. Whatever the claims of other leading American orators, Webster, all in all, is their chief. So he was regarded during his lifetime, and the years since his death have not diminished their renown. Indeed, now that Webster’s intense ambitions and bitter disappointments have been quenched in ashes, the solidity of his renown as an orator has become more apparent.

	He trod no deck; he rode no horse; he bore
	No truncheon and no sword. He only sate
	A simple Senator within the gate;
	But when he spoke, men listened: from every door.
	Surged round him like a sea without a shore—
	This man of the majestic mien who, late
	On his own shoulders had borne up the State;
	Hearts beat, eyes glistened. He would speak once more.
	The thunders gathered on his awful brow:
	He spoke. We know the story. He who shone
	On all the summits of occasion, now
	Shone upon this; and made the day his own:
	He did but speak within the Senate Hall
	Some pregnant hours, yet in that time saved all.

  Americans claim for Daniel Webster the highest place among modern orators. The verifications of such a claim would be a complicated process. But there can be no doubt that Webster was a magnificent speaker, or that his speeches, like those of Bright and unlike those of Clay, have a literary value of the highest and most lasting kind. In political oratory it would be hard to find anything superior to the reply to Hayne; in forensic oratory it would be hard to find anything superior to the speech on the murder of White; among show speeches it would be hard to find anything superior to the Plymouth oration. The economical and financial speeches have also the highest merits of speeches of that class…. Webster had not much imagination, and he seldom appealed to feeling. He reasons with irresistible force and in language plain but well-chosen, terse, and thoroughly effective. His sentences have been compared to the strokes of a trip hammer. Like the strokes of a trip hammer they are in sureness of aim and in the force with which they shatter the arguments on the other side, but not in monotony, for their construction and connection are sufficiently varied.

  Great as the Plymouth Oration was acknowledged by all to be, the Bunker Hill Address was a distinct advance upon it, both in the scope of the ideas and in the skill with which they are wrought into an organic whole. It is more compact, more picturesque, more vigorous, more finished. In this field of oratory he probably has never had any equal in the English-speaking world…. Probably no speech in history has had so many readers as the Reply to Hayne.

  I have said that Webster was called on to make this speech [Reply to Hayne], at short notice. A single night was, if I remember right, all that he had for immediate preparation for the first day’s effort, and one other night for that of the second day. He could have made but few notes, and the Brief which has been published—a very short one—may have been all that he committed to writing. Before going to the Senate Chamber on the morning of the first day he told Mr. Everett that as to the defence of the Constitution he had no misgivings, that he was always ready for that; and that his only anxiety was in regard to the personal and sectional parts of Colonel Hayne’s attack. As he entered the Senate Chamber, John M. Clayton, the senator from Delaware, said to him, “Webster, are you primed and loaded?” “Seven fingers,” was his only reply, with a gesture as if pointing to a gunbarrel. He spoke under great excitement, and with almost an air of inspiration. Of his emotions he said himself, not long afterward, “I felt as if everything I had ever seen or read or heard was floating before me in one grand panorama, and I had little else to do than to reach up and cull a thunderbolt and hurl it at him.”

  The greatest of American forensic orators, if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all orators who have used the English tongue. Webster’s speeches are of the kind that have power to move after the voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the passion in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than the issues of the moment.

  Webster’s very cravat, blue coat, and buff waistcoat seemed invested with an intellectual majesty. Even now, it is only needful to read over one of his grand speeches, as the second reply to Hayne, accounted his masterpiece, equally wonderful for its steady tramp of arguments and tremendous floods of feeling, to realize that overwhelming power. Webster’s earnestness and force of mind impressed themselves like sheer weight. Much as his regal presence and organ-range of voice enhanced the first effect of his oratory, it remains in print colossal eloquence.

  James Lowell and I were very angry with Webster for staying in old Tyler’s cabinet, and as he was to speak in Faneuil Hall on the evening of the 30th of September, 1842, we determined to go in and hoot at him and to show him that he had incurred our displeasure. There were three thousand people there, and we felt sure they would hoot with us, young as we were. But we reckoned without our host. Mr. Webster, beautifully dressed, stepped calmly forward. His great eyes looked, as I shall always think, straight at me. I pulled off my hat; James pulled off his. We both became cold as ice and respectful as Indian coolies. I saw James turn pale; he said I was livid. And when the great creature began that most beautiful exordium our scorn turned to deepest admiration, from abject contempt to belief and approbation.

General

  Earnestness, solidity of judgment, elevation of sentiment, broad and generous views of national policy, and a massive strength of expression, characterize all his works. We feel, in reading them, that he is a man of principles, not a man of expedients; that he never adopts opinions without subjecting them to stern tests; and that he recedes from them only at the bidding of reason and experience. He never seems to be playing a part, but always acting a life…. His patriotism has become part of his being. Deny him that, and you deny the authorship of his works. It has prompted the most majestic flights of his eloquence. It has given intensity to his purposes, and lent the richest glow to his genius. It has made his eloquence a language of the heart, felt and understood over every portion of the land it consecrates.

  Whoever, in after-times, shall write the history of the United States for the last forty years, will write the life of Daniel Webster; and whoever writes the life of Daniel Webster, as it ought to be written, will write the history of the Union from the time he took a leading part in its concerns.

  His style is remarkable for great clearness of statement. It is singularly emphatic. Clearness of statement, vigor of reasoning, and a faculty of making a question plain to the understanding, by the mere terms in which it is presented, are the traits which uniformly distinguish his writings, evident alike in a diplomatic note, a legislative debate, and an historical discourse. His dignity of expression, breadth of view, and force of thought, realize the ideal of a republican statesman, in regard, at least, to natural endowments; and his presence and manner, in the prime of his life, were analogous.

  He found his fertile nourishment in the books of the Bible, the simple energy of Homer, and the vivid grandeur of Milton. He has left traces of these studies on many a page. There was about Webster a constant air of nobility of soul. Whatever subject he touched lost nothing of its dignity with him. The occasion rose in his hand, as he connected it with interests beyond those of the present moment or the passing object.

  And he put his own crown-stamp on almost everything he uttered. There was no mistaking one of Webster’s great efforts. There is no mistaking them now. They will be distinguished, in all time to come, like pieces of old gold or silver plate, by an unmistakable mint-mark. He knew, like the casters or forgers of yonder Statue, not only how to pour forth burning words and blazing thoughts, but so to blend and fuse and weld together his facts and figures, his illustrations and arguments, his metaphors and subject matter, as to bring them all out at last into one massive and enduring image of his own great mind!

  In the sphere of literature to be held as one of the greatest authors and writers of our mother tongue that America has produced. We all recognize the great distinction in this regard of Burke and of Macaulay. In the flow of their eloquence as writers, and in the splendors of their diction, Mr. Webster did not approach them, nor would he have desired to imitate them. But I propose to the most competent critics of the Nation, that they can find nowhere six octavo volumes of printed literary production of an American, that contains as much noble and as much beautiful imagery, as much warmth of rhetoric, and of magnetic impression upon the reader, as are to be found in the collected writings and speeches of Daniel Webster.

  It is more than twenty years since we stood in the presence of Daniel Webster. We may now look at the great American with a steady gaze, and see him in his true proportions. He stands out against the sky of the past like Mont Blanc among the Alps. Not comprehended, not appreciated by the country in his time, we can observe him now through the serene light of intervening years, and study the elements that constituted his greatness. His fame will never be less than it is to-day. It must endure as long as the government which he upheld while he lived.

	To the Memory
	of
	DANIEL WEBSTER,
	our greatest Orator, Statesman, Author, the Saver of
	our National Union, the Crown and Consummation of
	American Intellect and Manhood, this edition
	of his favourite Poet is, with reverential
	affection, inscribed by the
	EDITOR.

  I have dwelt on the career of the grandest post-Revolution figure of the New World, because his work is less known in England than that of any other great American. In a country whose intellectual forte is oratory he surpasses all other orators.

“Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.”

More than this, his place among English-speaking orators is in the front rank. True, his style has traces of the exaggeration characteristic of almost all young countries, and the haste, to which we have referred as one of the attributes of his own. It superabounds in classical allusions (a fashion common to the closing years of the last and early years of this century in Great Britain, France, and Germany); its imagery is profuse, here and there florid. In Webster’s pages, as in those of most orators, we have platitudes side by side with passages of real power, and we are made alive to his want of true humour by his lack of reticence. But beneath all the verbiage there is constantly present to us a man of realities, of pith and power and catholic sympathies enough to make us forget the cavils of superfine critics, with no more energy than mantlepiece ornaments, whose one idea is to make pedestals to themselves by smoothing sentences. Under the “barbaric pearl and gold” there is a buff jerkin; the flowers make summer over a block of Puritan granite. Webster, fed on strong meat—the Bible, Homer and Milton—is always strong, always clear. His six volumes can be read with little fatigue, and relished for instruction as well as heat; though superfluent, he never brings in bombast to plaster lack of knowledge or impotence of thought.

  We watch the feats of some superb athlete, and all that he does is impossible to us, far beyond our reach; but we understand how everything is done, and what muscles are needed. We observe the performances of an Eastern juggler; we see the results, we appreciate the skill, but the secret of the trick escapes us. This is true also of mental operations; it is the difference between the mind of Shakespeare and that of Pitt, a difference, not of degree, but of kind. Webster belongs to the athletes.

  A careful study of his speeches cannot fail to be of interest and benefit to the student of English prose literature and English style.

  He understood the character and genius of the American people, and the principles upon which their national organization was founded. No one more fully appreciated the importance of abiding consistently by those great principles, as their successful operation in this country was of vast importance in the progress of humanity, in bringing it to a proper understanding of individual responsibility and governmental authority.

  We can not imagine a time nor a condition of society when Webster’s morning drum-beat passage will lose its charm. His description of a superior human intellect in his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson is so true, so graphic, and so grand, that it must always command the admiration of the reader. Without exaggeration he has painted the scene of the murder of Captain White, and given voice to the thoughts and sentiments of the assassin, in manner and form so truthful and attractive that his words must find a place in the living literature of future times.

  Daniel Webster is not likely to be forgotten, nor will his words cease to be read. For he wasted no time on party politics, or on small questions, or on issues now dead; but always in the courts, or in the Senate, or before the people, applied his matchless powers to subjects of great moment and popular interest, sure to remain vital, and, like the seasons, ever returning. In these respects he stands alone among the statesmen of his day; and therefore, if they would, the people can never forget him. Nor can statesmen, jurists, or scholars; because, about government, laws, and public policy he said the most authoritative word, save John Marshall’s, and said it in a way not easily bettered.

  As the master of a pure and vigorous English prose style, Webster has had few equals. His best orations may be studied as models of correct diction and rhetorical finish. His style may be characterized as majestic. It abounds in sonorous and elaborate word pictures. He was a clear thinker, and his sentences are as clear as his thought. His combinations are accurate and logical, and his illustrations are forceful. The orations of Clay and Calhoun seem dull and spiritless as we read them now; the magnetism of the orator, the tones of his voice, the flash of his eye, and the thrill of the occasion gave the words a life and power which vanished as soon as they passed into print. But Webster’s orations lose nothing with time. They are full of their original force and fire. They hold the reader as the orator held his audience, and we feel the thrill and excitement of the original occasion. It is this that brings the work of Webster into the realm of pure literature.

  Of the generation of American statesmen that followed those of the Revolutionary period, few will live as long in the memory of the people, and none as long in the literature of the country, as Daniel Webster.