administration of Taylor. Webster remained in that position until 1850, when he was made Secretary of State by President Fillmore. In this high office death found him. He died at Marshfield, Mass., Oct. 24, 1852. The last words that passed his lips were, "I still live.”

Webster's person was imposing: he was of commanding height and well proportioned; his head was of great size, and his eyes were deep-seated, large, and lustrous. His voice was powerful, sonorous, and flexible; his action, without being remarkably graceful, was appropriate and impressive. Carlyle, in a letter to Emerson written in 1839, thus describes the appearance of Webster, then on a visit to England:

"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notablest of all your notabilities, Daniel Webster. 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."

Webster's productions are pre-eminently national. His works all refer to the history, the policy, the laws, the government, the social life, and the destiny of his own land. They came from the heart and understanding of one into whose very nature the life of his coun

try had passed. His patriotism became part of his being. It prompted the most majestic flights of his eloquence. It gave intensity to his purposes, and lent the richest glow to his genius. It made his eloquence a language of the heart, felt and understood over every portion of the land it consecrates. On Plymouth Rock, on Bunker Hill, at Mount Vernon, by the tombs of Hamilton and Adams and Jefferson and Jay, we are reminded of Daniel Webster.

66

―

Webster was undoubtedly the greatest forensic orator that America has produced. He has been compared to Burke, but they differed greatly. In strength and richness of imagination Burke was incomparable; he was, as Dr. Johnson described him, emphatically a constellation." Webster, paying little heed to the arts of the rhetorician, produced his effects by powerful logic, high-souled enthusiasm, and a perfect manliness of style. Yet there was one form of eloquence in which he was pre-eminently great, the eloquence of the civic oration; that is, the oration on some high theme of national history. Says Rufus Choate, "In addressing masses by tens of thousands in the open air, on the urgent political questions of the day, or designated to lead the meditations of an hour devoted to the remembrance of some national era, or of some incident marking the progress of the nation, and lifting him up to a view of what is, and what is past, and some indistinct revelations of the glory that lies in the future, or of some great historical name, just borne by the nation to his tomb, he exemplified an eloquence in which I do not know that he has had a superior among men."

1. THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON.

[The following, though not one of the grandest examples of Webster's civic orations, is a very noble discourse, and has special interest from its subject. It was pronounced Feb. 22, 1832, in Washington City, at a public dinner for the purpose of commemorating the centennial anniversary of Washington's birthday.]

I RISE, gentlemen, to propose to you the name of that great man in commemoration of whose birth, and in honor of whose character and services, we have here assembled.

I am sure that I express a sentiment common to every one present, when I say that there is something more than ordinarily solemn and affecting in this occasion.1

We are met to testify our regard for him whose name is intimately blended with whatever belongs most essentially to the prosperity, the liberty, the free institutions, and the renown of our country. That name was of power2 to rally a nation, in the hour of thick-thronging public disasters and calamities; that name shone amid the storm of war, a beacon light to cheer and guide the country's friends; it flamed, too, like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name, in the days of peace, was a loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole people's love, and the whole world's respect. That name, descending with all

1 I am..

3

occasion. How many | plain the grammatical construcclauses in this complex sentence? tion. Explain the metaphor. 2 was of power. Substitute a 4 was a loadstone. What is the synonymous expression. figure of speech? Change to a

3 shone . . . a beacon light. Ex-simile.

time, spreading over the whole earth, and uttered in all the languages belonging to the tribes and races of men, will for ever be pronounced with affectionate gratitude by every one in whose breast there shall arise an aspiration for human rights and human liberty.

We perform this grateful duty, gentlemen, at the expiration of a hundred years from his birth, near the place so cherished1 and beloved by him, where his dust now reposes, and in the capital which bears his own immortal name.

4

All experience evinces that human sentiments are strongly influenced by associations. The recurrence 3 of anniversaries, or of longer periods of time, naturally freshens the recollection, and deepens the impression, of events with which they are historically connected. Renowned places, also, have a power to awaken feeling which all acknowledge. No American can pass by the fields of Bunker Hill, Monmouth, or Camden,5 as if they were ordinary spots on the earth's surface. Whoever visits them feels the sentiment of love of country kindling anew, as if the spirit that belonged to the transactions which have rendered these places distinguished still hovered round, with power to move and excite all who in future time may approach them.

But neither of these sources of emotion equals the power with which great moral examples affect the

mind. When sublime virtues cease to be abstractions, when they become embodied in human character, and exemplified in human conduct, we should be false to our own nature, if we did not indulge in the spontaneous effusions of our gratitude and our admiration.1

A true lover of the virtue of patriotism delights to contemplate its purest models; and that love of country may be well suspected which affects to soar so high into the regions of sentiment as to be lost and absorbed in the abstract feeling, and becomes too elevated or too refined to glow with fervor in the commendation or the love of individual benefactors. All this is unnatural. It is 2 as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry as to care nothing for Homer or Milton; so passionately attached to eloquence as to be indifferent to Tully and Chatham; or such a devotee to the arts, in such an ecstasy with the elements of beauty, proportion, and expression, as to regard the masterpieces of Raphael and Michael Angelo with coldness or con

5

1 When... admiration. Change | He was a warm advocate of Amerithe order of words so as to transform can interests as against the arbitrary this period into a loose sentence. policy of the British government.

2 It is, etc. Supply ellipses. In this sentence, which three terms are instances of the "abstract feeling" previously spoken of?

8 Tully: i.e., Cicero, whose full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero (B. C. 106-13), the prince of Roman

orators.

5 Raphael (born at Urbino, in Italy, 1483; died, 1520) is ranked by almost universal opinion as the greatest of painters; by his countrymen he was called Il Divino, "the divine."

6 Michael Angelo (born at Chiusi, in Italy, 1474; died in Rome, 4 Chatham. William Pitt, Earl 1563) stood almost unrivaled as a of Chatham (1708-1778), was one painter, sculptor, and architect, in of the greatest English orators and the age when Christian art had statesmen of the eighteenth century. | reached its zenith.