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the means of education were scanty, and at a period when the country was rent with civil dissensions. A large majority of those who are called educated men have been surrounded by all the implements and processes of instruction; but Webster won his education by battling against difficulties. "A dwarf behind a steam-engine can remove mountains; but no dwarf can hew them down with a pick axe, and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms." Every step in that long journey, by which the son of the New Hampshire farmer has obtained the highest rank in social and political life, has been one of strenuous effort. The space is crowded with incidents, and tells of obstacles sturdily met and fairly overthrown. His life and his writings seem to bear testimony, that he can perform whatever he strenuously attempts. His words never seem disproportioned to his strength. Indeed, he rather gives the impression that he has powers and impulses in reserve, to be employed when the occasion for their exercises may arise. In many of his speeches, not especially pervaded by passion, we perceive strength, indeed, but strength "half-leaning on his own right-arm." He has never yet been placed in circumstances where the full might of his nature, in all its depth of understanding, fiery vehemence of sensibility, and adamantine strength of will, have been brought to bear on any one object, and strained to their utmost.

We have referred to Webster's productions as being eminently national. Every one familiar with them will bear out the statement. In fact, the most hurried glance at his life would prove, that, surrounded as he has been from his youth by American influences, it could hardly be otherwise. His earliest recollections must extend nearly to the feelings and incidents of the Revolution. His whole life since that period has been passed in the country of his birth, and his fame and honors are all closely connected with American feelings and institutions. His works all refer to the history, the policy, the laws, the government, the social life, and the destiny, of his own land. They bear little resemblance, in their

tone and spirit, to productions of the same class on the other side of the Atlantic. They have come from the heart and understanding of one into whose very nature the life of his country has passed. Without taking into view the influences to which his youth and early manhood were subjected, so well calculated to inspire a love for the very soil of his nativity, and to mould his mind into accordance with what is best and noblest in the spirit of our institutions, his position has been such as to lead him to survey objects from an American point of view. 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. On Plymouth Rock, on Bunker's Hill, at Mount Vernon, by the tombs of Hamilton, and Adams, and Jefferson, and Jay, we are reminded of Daniel Webster. He has done what no national poet has yet succeeded in doing,-associated his own great genius with all in our country's history and scenery which makes us rejoice that we are Americans. Over all those events in our history which are heroical, he has cast the hues of strong feeling and vivid imagination. He cannot stand on one spot of ground, hallowed by liberty or religion, without being kindled by the genius of the place; he cannot mention a name, consecrated by self-devotion and patriotism, without doing it eloquent homage. Seeing clearly, and feeling deeply, he makes us see and feel with him. That scene of the landing of Pilgrims, in which his imagination conjures up the forms and emotions of our New England ancestry, will ever live in the national memory. We see, with him, the little "bark, with the interesting group on its deck, make it slow progress to the shore." We feel, with him, "the cold which benumbed," and listen, with him, "to the winds which pierced them." Carver, and Bradford, and Standish, and Brewster, and Allerton, look out upon us from the pictured

page, in all the dignity with which virtue and freedom invest their martyrs; and we see, too, "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless but for a mother's arms, couchless but for a mother's breast," till our own blood almost freezes.

The readiness with which the orator compels our sympathies to follow his own is again illustrated in the orations at Bunker Hill, and in the discourse in honor of Adams and Jefferson. In reading them, we feel a new pride, in our country, and in the great men and great principles it has cherished.) The mind feels an unwonted elevation, and the heart is stirred with emotions of more than common depth, by their majesty and power. Some passages are so graphic and true that they seem gifted with a voice, and to speak to us from the page they illumine. The intensity of feeling with which they are pervaded rises at times from confident hope to prophecy, and lifts the soul as with wings. In that splendid close to a remarkable passage in the oration on Adams and Jefferson, what American does not feel assured, with the orator, that their fame will be immortal? "Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record to their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored. Marble columns may, indeed, moulder into dust, time may erase all impress from the crumbling stone, but their fame remains; for with AMERICAN LIBERTY it rose, and with AMERICAN LIBERTY ONLY can it perish. It was the last swelling peal of yonder choir, 'Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name LIVETH EVERMORE." I catch the solemn song, I echo that lofty strain of funeral triumph, 'THEIR NAME LIVETH EVERMORE.

In that noble burst of eloquence, in the speech on the Greek Revolution, in which he asserts the power of the moral sense of the world, in checking the dominion of brute force, and rendering insecure the spoils of successful oppression, we have a strong instance of his reliance on the triumph of right over might.

"This public opinion of the civilized world," he says, "may be silenced by military power, but it cannot be conquered. It is elastic, irrepressible, and invulnerable

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to the weapons of ordinary power. It follows the conqueror back to the very scene of his ovations; it calls upon him to take notice, that Europe, though silent, is yet indignant it shows him, that the sceptre of his victory is a barren sceptre, that it shall confer neither joy nor honor, but shall moulder to dry ashes in his grasp. In the midst of his exultation, it pierces his ear with the cry of injured justice, it denounces against him the indignation of an enlightened and civilized age; it turns to bitterness the cup of his rejoicing, and wounds him with the sting which belongs to the consciousness of having outraged the opinion of mankind."

The most splendid image to be found in any of his works closes a passage in which he attempts to prove that our fathers accomplished the Revolution on a strict question of principle.

"It was against the recital of an act of parliament, rather than against any suffering under its enactments, that they took up arms. They went to war against a preamble! They fought seven years against a declaration. They poured out their treasures and their blood like water, in a contest in opposition to an assertion, which those less sagacious, and not so well schooled in the principles of civil liberty, would have regarded as barren phraseology, or mere parade of words.....On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory, is not to be compared,—a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

The imagination of Mr. Webster, if not that of a poet, is eminently the imagination which befits an orator and debater. A statesman who is to present his views on a question of national policy in lucid order, and to illustrate them by familiar pictures, would fail in attaining his object, if he substituted fancies for reason, or linked his reasoning with too subtile images. Mr. Webster's imagination never leads him astray from his logic, but only illumines the path. It is no delicate Ariel, sporting with abstract thought, and clothing it in a succession of pleasing shapes; but a power fettered by the chain of argument it brightens. Even in his noblest bursts of eloquence, we are struck rather by the elevation of the feeling, than the vigor of the imagination. For

instance, in the Bunker Hill oration, he closes an animated passage with the well-known sentence," Let it rise till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of morning gild it, and parting day linger and play upon its summit." If we take from this passage all the phrases which are not strictly original, and separate the sentiment from the invention, we shall find that it is not eminently creative.

In Mr. Webster's style, we always perceive that a presiding power of intellect regulates his use of terms. The amplitude of his comprehension is the source of his felicity of expression. He bends language into the shape of his thought; he never accommodates his thought to his language. The grave, high, earnest nature of the man looks out upon us from his well-knit, massive, compact sentences. We feel that we are reading the works of one whose greatness of mind and strength of passion no conventionalism could distort, and no exterior process of culture could polish into feebleness and affectation; of one who has lived a life, as well as passed through a college,—who has looked at nature and man as they are in themselves, not as they appear in books. We can trace back expressions to influences coming from the woods and fields, from the fireside of the farmer,-from the intercourse of social life. The secret of his style is not to be found in Kames or Blair, but in his own mental and moral constitution. (There is a tough, sinewy strength in his diction, which gives it almost muscular power in forcing its way to the heart and understanding.) Occasionally, his words are of that kind which are called "half-battles, stronger than most men's deeds." In the course of an abstract discussion, or a clear statement of facts, he will throw in a sentence which almost makes us spring to our feet. When vehemently roused, either from the excitement of opposition, or in unfolding a great principle which fills and expands his soul, or in paying homage to some noble exemplar of virtue and genius, his style has a Miltonic grandeur and roll, which can hardly be surpassed for majestic eloquence. In that exulting rush of the mind, when every faculty

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