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inspired his soul with a Divinity which shaped his lofty destiny, and threw a light upon his track of glory which no fortune could obscure. She bore him up to the Pisgah of Renown, where he sat solitary and alone, the monarch of a realm, whose conqueror wears no bloody laurels-whose fair domain no carnage can despoil, and in whose bright crown no pillaged pearls are set.

As a Forensic orator, I know of no age, past or present, which can boast his superior. He united the boldness and energy of the Grecian, and the grandeur and strength of the Roman, to an original, sublime simplicity, which neither Grecian nor Roman possessed. He did not deal in idle declamation and lofty expression; his ideas were not embalmed in rhetorical embellishments, nor buried up in the superfluous tinselry of me taphor and trope. He clothed them for the occasion, and if the crisis demanded, they stood forth naked, in all their native majesty, armed with a power which would not bend to the passion, but only stooped to conquer the reason. Sublime, indeed, it was to see that giant mind when roused in all its grandeur, sweep over the fields of reason and imagination, bearing down all opposition, as with the steady and resistless power of the ocean billows,—to see the eye, the brow, the gesture, the whole man speaking with an utterance toe sublime for language-a logic too lofty for speech. He spoke like a Divinity—

“ Each conception was a heavenly guest,

A ray of immortality,--and stood

Starlike, around, until they gathered to a God !"

The highest honors America can confer upon her noblest son, can prove but her bankruptcy. She can never rear a colossal monument worthy of his towering genius. He needs no marble column or sculptured urn to perpetuate his memory, or tell his worth to rising generations.

Exegit "monumentum aere perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,"

His fame shall outlive marble, for when time shall efface every

letter from the crumbling stone,-yea, when the marble itself shall dissolve to dust, his memory shall be more deeply encased in the hearts of unborn millions, and from his tomb shall arise a sacred incense which shall garnish the concave of his native sky with the brightest galaxy of posthumous fame, and on its broad arch of studded magnificence shall be braided in "characters of living light,” Daniel Webster! the great Defender of the Constitution!

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The nation mourns, and well it may. He has left a void which none can fill—laid forever at rest in the humble grave, by the side of the sea- the wild waves sing his requiem. With Mount Vernon and Ashland, his tomb will be a place where men in all coming time will resort, to bring away memorials from the sanctuary of the mighty dead. Patriotism, when it desponds, will go there, look and live; factional strife and sectional jealousy will feel rebuked when they visit the last resting place of him whose labors of a lifetime were to transmit the blessings of life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which God ordained should first be made manifest in America. Not far from his grave is that hallowed spot in American history, where

The beams of the

the spot where the

"The heavy night hung dark

The hills and waters o'er,

As a band of exiles moored their bark

On wild New England's shore."

setting sun will fall with a mellowed light on majestic form of Webster moulders back to dust, and where the anthem of the Puritan was heard as he came to build an altar to his God, and find a quiet tomb.

It is not with the vain hope of adding a single ray to the already dazzling focus of his fame, that we have attempted to eulogize his worth; but with the high purpose of testifying those feelings of reverence and admiration, next to idolatry, which, in the contemplation of so sublime a character, burn in the bosom of every American youth, that we have dared to approach the tomb of buried greatness, and twine a single laurel in the cypress that overhangs

his sepulchre of glory. May the worshipper of after years approach that hallowed shrine with no empty offering of idle curiosity,—no vain and soulless orisons, but with grateful and devout homage may the pilgrims of another age journey with reverent adoration to that consecrated spot, and, arched upon its humble tablet, read, in that simple but significant epitah, “ I still live!”—the high, prophetic record of the last and sublimest victory of his life—that of the umblenching spirit over death.

The sun that illumined that planet of clay,
Had sunk in the west of an unclouded day,

And the cold dews of Death stood like diamonds of light
Thickly set in the pale dusky forehead of night;
From each gleamed a ray of that fetterless soul,
Which had bursted its prison, despising control,
And careering above, o'er earth's darkness and gloom,
Inscribed, "I still live," on the arch of the tomb.

The gleam of that promise shall brighten the page
Of the Prophet and Statesman thro' each rolling age;
He lives! prince and peasant shall join he acclaim ;
No fortune can make him the martyr of Fame.

He lives! from the grave of the Patriot Greek

Comes the voice of the dead, which tho' silent, shall speak;
Light leaps from the cloud which has deepened her gloom,
And flashes its glance on the arch of his tomb!

He lives! ever lives, in the hearts of the Free;
The wing of his fame spreads across the broad sea;
He lives where the banner of Freedom's unfurled ;
The pride of New England--the wealth of the world!
Thou land of the Pilgrim! how hallowed the bed
Where thy Patriot sleeps, and thy heroes have bled!
Let
age after age in perennial bloom

Braid the light of thy stars on the arch of his tomb!

EULOGY

ON ADAMS AND JEFFERSON,

DELIVERED AUGUST 2D, 1826.

THIS is an unaccustomed spectacle. For the first time, fellow citizens, badges of mourning shroud the columns and overhang the arches of this Hall. These walls, which were consecrated, so long ago, to the cause of American liberty, which witnessed her infant struggles, and rung with the shouts of her earliest victories, proclaim now that distinguished friends and champions of that great cause have fallen. It is right that it should be thus. The tears which flow, and the honors that are paid, when the Founders of the Republic die, give hope that the Republic itself may be immortal. It is fit, that by public assembly and solemn observance, by anthem and by eulogy, we commemorate the services of national benefactors, extol their virtues, and render thanks to God for eminent blessings, early given and long continued, to our favored country.

ADAMS and JEFFERSON are now no more; and we are assembled, fellow citizens, the aged, the middle aged and the young, by the spontaneous impulse of all, under the authority of the municipal government, with the presence of the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth, and others its official representatives, the university, and the learned societies, to bear our part, in those manifestations of respect and gratitude which universally pervade the land. ADAMS and JEFFERSON are no more. On our fiftieth anniversary, the great day of National Jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and re-echoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight, together to the world of spirits.

If it be true that no one can safely be pronounced happy while he lives; if that event which terminates life can alone crown its honors and its glory, what felicity is here! The great Epic of their lives, how happily concluded! Poetry itself has hardly closed illustrious lives, and finished the career of earthly renown, by such a consummation. If we had the power, we could not wish to reverse this dispensation of the Divine Providence. The great objects of life were accomplished, the drama was ready to be closed; it has closed; our pat riots have fallen; but so fallen, at such age, with such coincidence, on such a day, that we cannot rationally lament that that end has come, which we knew could not be long deferred.

Neither of these great men, fellow citizens, could have died, at any time, without leaving an immense void in our American society. They have been so intimately, and for so long a time blended with the history of the country, especially so united, in our thoughts and recollections, with the events of the

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Revolution, that the death of either would have touched the strings of public sympathy. We should have felt that one great link, connecting us with former times, was broken; that we had lost something more, as it were, of the presence of the Revolution itself, and of the act of independence, and were driven on, by another great remove, from the days of our country's early distinction, to meet posterity, and to mix with the future. Like the mariner, whom the ocean and the winds carry along, till the stars which have directed his course, and lighted his pathless way, descend, one by one, beneath the rising horizon, we should have felt that the stream of time had borne us onward, till another great luminary, whose light had cheered us, and whose guidance we had followed, had sunk away from our sight.

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But the concurrence of their death, on the anniversary of Independence, has naturally awakened stronger emotions. Both had been presidents, both had lived to great age, both were early patriots, and both were distinguished and ever honored by their immediate agency in the act of independence. It cannot but seem striking and extraordinary, that these two should live to see the fiftieth year from the date of that act; that they should complete that year; and that then, on the day which had fast linked forever their own fame with their country's glory, the heavens should open to receive them both at once. their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is not willing to recognize in their happy termination as well as in their long continuance, proofs that our country, and its benefactors, are objects of His care? ADAMS and JEFFERSON, I have said, are no more. As human beings indeed, they are no more. They are no more, as in 1776, bold and fearless advocates of independence; no more as on subsequent periods, the head of the government; no more as we have recently seen them, aged and venerable objects of admiration and regard. They are no more. They are dead. But how little is there, of the great and good, which can die! To their country they yet live, and live forever. They live in all that perpetuates the remembrance of men on earth; in the recorded proofs of their own great actions in the offspring of their intellect, in the deep engraved lines of public gratitude, and in the respect and homage of mankind. They live in their example; and they live, emphatically, and will live in the influence which their lives and efforts, their principles and opinions, now exercise, and will continue to exercise, on the affairs of men, not only in their own country, but throughout the civilized world. A superior and commanding human intellect, a truly great man, when Heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift, is not a temporary flame, burning bright for a while, and then expiring, giving place to returning darkness. It is rather a spark of fervent heat, as well as radiant light, with power to enkindle the common mass of human mind; so that when it glimmers, in its own decay, and finally goes out in death, no night follows; but it leaves the world all light, all on fire, from the potent contact of its own spirit. Bacon died; but the human understanding, roused by the touch of his miraculous wand, to a perception of the true philosophy, and the just mode of inquiring after truth, has kept on its course, successfully and gloriously. Newton died; yet the courses of the spheres are still known, and they yet move on, in the orbits which he saw, and described for them, in the infinity of space.

No two men now live, fellow-citizens, perhaps it may be doubted, whether any two men have ever lived, in one age, who, more than those we now commemorate, have impressed their own sentiments, in regard to politics and government, on mankind, infused their own opinions more deeply into the opinions of others, or given a more lasting direction to the current of human thought.

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