DANIEL WEBSTER AS A MAN.* GENTLEMEN, I RISE in pursuance of the object which has brought us together at this time; the only object, certainly, which, after long retirement from scenes of public festivity, would have induced me to occupy the chair in which you have placed me this evening. We have assembled on this, the anniversary of his birthday, to pay an affectionate tribute to one of the greatest and wisest and purest of the patriots, statesmen, and citizens of America. Still, my friends, I do not rise to pronounce the eulogy of Daniel Webster. That work was performed, at the time of his lamented decease, in almost every part of the country, and by a greater number of the distinguished writers and speakers of the United States than have, in any former instance, with the single exception of Washington, paid this last office of respect to departed worth. It was in many cases performed with extraordinary ability; among others, especially, by gentlemen of more than one profession, who favor us with their presence on this occasion, whose performances, besides doing noble justice to their great theme, will take a permanent place in the literature of the country. In their presence I rise for no such presumptuous purpose; before this company I rise for no such superfluous attempt, as that of pronouncing a formal eulogy on the public character and services of the great man to whose memory we consecrate the evening. On the contrary, gentlemen, on this occasion and in this * At a dinner on the 18th January, 1856, the Anniversary of the Birth day of Daniel Webster. circle of friends, most of whom, in a greater or less degree of intimacy, were individually known to him, and had cultivated kindly personal relations with him, I wish rather to speak of the MAN. Let us to-night leave his great fame to the country's, to the world's care. It needs not our poor attestation; it has passed into the history of the United States, where it will last and bloom for ever. The freshly remembered presence of the great jurist, invisible to the eye of sense, still abides in our tribunals; the voice of the matchless orator yet echoes from the arches of Faneuil Hall. If ever it is given to the spirits of the departed to revisit the sphere of their activity and usefulness on earth, who can doubt that the shade of Webster returns with anxiety to that Senate which so often hung with admiration upon his lips, and walks by night an unseen guardian along the terrace of the capitol? Of what he was and what he did, and how he spoke and wrote and counselled and persuaded and controlled and swayed, in all these great public capacities, his printed works contain the proof and the exemplification; recent recollection preserves the memory; and eulogy, warm and emphatic, but not exaggerated, has set forth the marvellous record. If all else which in various parts of the country has been spoken and written of him should be forgotten, (and there is much, very much that will be permanently remembered,) the eulogy of Mr. Hillard pronounced at the request of the city of Boston, and the discourse of Mr. Choate delivered at Dartmouth College, whose great sufficiency of fame it is to have nurtured two such pupils,—have unfolded the intellectual, professional, and public character of Daniel Webster, with an acuteness of analysis, a wealth of illustration, and a splendor of diction, which will convey to all coming time an adequate and vivid conception of the great original. But, my friends, how little they knew of him, who knew him only as a public man; how little they knew even of his personal appearance, who never saw his countenance except when darkened with the shadows of his sometimes saddened brow, or clothed with the terrors of his deep flashing eye! These at times gave a severity to his aspect, which added not a little to the desolating force of his invective and the withering power of his sarcasm, when compelled to put on the panoply of forensic or parliamentary war. But no one really knew even his personal appearance who was not familiar with his radiant glance, his sweet expression, his beaming smile, lighting up the circle of those whom he loved and trusted, and in whose sympathy he confided! Were I to fix upon any one trait as the prominent trait of his character as a man, it would be his social disposition, his loving heart. If there ever was a person who felt all the meaning of the divine utterance, "it is not good that man should be alone," it was he. Notwithstanding the vast resources of his own mind, and the materials for self-communion laid up in the store-house of such an intellect, few men whom I have known have been so little addicted to solitary and meditative introspection; to few have social intercourse, sympathy, and communion with kindred or friendly spirits been so grateful and even necessary. Unless actually occupied with his pen or his books, and coerced into the solitude of his study for some specific employment, he shunned to be alone. He preferred dictation to solitary composition, especially in the latter part of his life, and he much liked, on the eve of a great effort, if it had been in his power to reduce the heads of his argument to writing, to go over them with a friend. Although it is not my purpose, as I have said, on this occasion to dwell on political topics, I may, in illustration of this last remark, observe that it was my happiness, at his request, to pass a part of the evening of the 25th January, 1830, with him; and he went over to me from a very concise brief the main topics of the speech prepared for the following day — the second speech on Foot's resolution, which he accounted the greatest of his parliamentary efforts. Intense anticipation, I need not remind you, awaited that effort, both at Washington and throughout the country. A pretty formidable personal attack was to be repelled; New England was to be vindicated against elaborate disparagement; and, more than all, the true theory of the Constitution, as hereto fore generally understood, was to be maintained against a new interpretation, devised by perhaps the acutest logician in the country; asserted with equal confidence and fervor; and menacing a revolution in the government. Never had a public speaker a harder task to perform; and except on the last great topic, which undoubtedly was familiar to his habitual contemplations, his opportunity for preparation had been most inconsiderable,- for the argument of his accomplished opponent had been concluded but the day before the reply was to be made. I sat an hour and a half with Mr. Webster the evening before this great effort. The impassioned parts of his speech, and those in which the personalities of his antagonist were retorted, were hardly indicated in his prepared brief. So calm and tranquil was he, so entirely at ease and free from that nervous excitement which is almost unavoidable, so near the moment which is to put the whole man to the proof, that I was tempted, absurdly enough, to think him not sufficiently aware of the magnitude of the occasion. I ventured even to intimate to him, that what he was to say the next day would, in a fortnight's time, be read by every grown man in the country. But I soon perceived that his calmness was the repose of conscious power. The battle had been fought and won within, upon the broad field of his own capacious mind; for it was Mr. Webster's habit first to state to himself his opponent's argument in its utmost strength, and having overthrown it in that form, he feared the efforts of no other antagonist. Hence it came to pass that he was never taken by surprise, by any turn of the discussion. Besides, the moment and the occasion were too important for trepidation. A surgeon might as well be nervous, who is going to cut within a hair's breadth of a great artery. He was not only at ease, but sportive and full of anecdote; and, as he told the senate playfully the next day, he slept soundly that night on the formidable assault of his accomplished adversary. So the great Condé slept on the eve of the battle of Rocroi; so Alexander the Great slept on the eve of the battle of Arbela; and so they awoke to deeds of immortal fame. As I saw him in the evening, (if I may borrow an illustration from his favorite amusement,) he was as unconcerned and as free of spirit as some here present have often seen him, while floating in his fishing-boat along a hazy shore, gently rocking on the tranquil tide, dropping his line here and there, with the varying fortune of the sport. The next morning, he was like some mighty Admiral, dark and terrible; casting the long shadow of his frowning tiers far over the sea, that seemed to sink beneath him; his broad pendant streaming at the main, the stars and the stripes at the fore, the mizzen, and the peak; and bearing down like a tempest upon his antagonist, with all his canvas strained to the wind, and all this thunders roaring from his broadsides. Do not wonder, my friends, that I employ these military illustrations. I do so partly because, to the imaginations of most men, they suggest the liveliest conceptions of contending energy and power; partly because they are in themselves appropriate "Peace hath her victories Not less renowned than war." On the two sides of this great parliamentary contest there were displayed as much intellectual power, as much moral courage, as much elevation of soul, as in any campaign, ancient or modern. And from the wars of those old Assyrian kings and conquerors, whose marble effigies, now lying on the floor of Mr. William Appleton's warehouse, after sleeping for twenty-five hundred years on the banks of the Tigris, have, by the strange vicissitudes and changes of human things, been dug up from the ruins of Nineveh and transported across the Atlantic-a wonder and a show, — I say from the wars of Sennacherib and Nimrod himself, whose portraits, for aught I know to the contrary, are among the number, down to that now raging in the Crimea, there never was a battle fought whose consequences were more important to humanity, than the maintenance or overthrow of that constitutional Union which, in the language of Washington, "makes us one people." Yes, better had |