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of gratitude and pride. There is enough of Daniel Webster, sir, to furnish a common ground upon which all his countrymen can mingle their hearty tributes to his memory.

He was a man to be remarked anywhere. Among a barbarous people he would have excited reverence by his very look and mien. No one could stand before him without knowing that he stood in a majestic presence, and admiring those lineaments of greatness with which his Creator had enstamped, in a manner not to be mistaken, his outward form. If there ever was such an instance on earth, his was the appearance described by the great dramatist:

"The combination and the form indeed,

Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man."

No one could listen to him, in his happier moments, without feeling his spirit stirred within him by those deep, cathedral tones which were the fit vehicles of his grave and earnest thoughts.

No one can read his writings without being struck by the wonderful manner in which they unite a severe simplicity of style with great warmth of fancy, and great affluence of diction.

We, Mr. Speaker, remember his look and his spoken words; but, by those who are to come after us, he will be chiefly known through that written eloquence which is gathered in our public records, and enshrined among the pages of his published works. By these, at least, he still lives, and by these, in my judgment, he will continue to live, after these pillars shall have fallen, and this Capitol shall have crumbled into ruin. Demosthenes has survived the Parthenon, and Tully still pleads before the world the cause of Roman culture and Roman oratory; but there is nothing, it seems to me, either in Tully or in Demosthenes, which, for conception, or language, or elevation of sentiment, can exceed some passages in the writings which remain of Daniel Webster. His fame, indeed, is secure, for it is guarded by his own works; and, as he himself said of Mr. Calhoun, "he has lived long enough, he has

done enough, and he has done it so well, so successfully, so honorably, as to connect himself for all time with the records of his country."

In no respect, Mr. Speaker, is this an occasion of lamentation for him. Death was not meant to be regarded as an evil, or else it would not come alike to all; and about Mr. Webster's death there were many circumstances of felicity and good fortune. He died in the maturity of his intellect, after long public service, and after having achieved a great name for himself, and a great memory for his country. He died at home; his last wants supplied by the hands of affection; his last hours cheered by the consolations of friendship; amidst those peaceful scenes which he had himself assisted to make beautiful, and within hearing of that ocean-anthem to which he always listened with emotions of gratitude and joy. He died, too, conscious of the wonderful growth and prosperity and glory of his native land. His eloquent prayer had been answered-the prayer which he breathed forth to Providence at the greatest era of his life, when he stood side by side with Andrew Jackson, and they both contended for what was, in their belief, the cause of the Constitution and the Union.

I pause, Mr. Speaker, at the combination of those two names. Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster! Daniel Webster and Andrew Jackson! With the clear intellect and glorious oratory of the one, added to the intuitive sagacity and fate-like will of the other, I will not ask what wrong is there which they could not successfully crush, but what right is there, rather, which could withstand their united power?

"When my eyes," he said on that great occasion, "are turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, with fraternal blood. Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or

polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and union afterward;' but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart, 'Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.' Sir, Mr. Webster outlived the crisis of 1830, and saw his country emerge in safety, also, from that later tempest of sectional disturbance, whose waters are even yet heaving with the swell of subdued but not exhausted passion. He left this nation great, prosperous, and happy; and, more than that, he left the Constitution and the Union in vigorous existence, under whose genial influences all that glory, and prosperity, and happiness, he knew, had been achieved. To preserve them, he had risked what few men have to risk-his reputation, his good name, his cherished friendships; and if there be any who doubt the wisdom of his 7th of March speech, let them consider the value of these treasures, and they will at least give him credit for patriotism and sincerity. But I am unwilling, Mr. Speaker, to dwell upon this portion of his career. The fires of that crisis have subsided, but their ashes are yet warm with recent strife. What Mr. Webster did, and the other great men with whom he labored, to extinguish those fires, has gone into the keeping of history, and they have found their best reward in the continued safety of the republic.

Our anxiety need not be for them. When the mariner is out upon the ocean, and sees, one by one, the lights of heaven go out before the rising storm, he does not ask what has become of those lights, or whether they shall renew their lustre; but his inquiry is, what is to become of me, and how am I to guide my bark in safety, after these natural pilots of the sky have disappeared? Yet even then, by consulting those calculations and directions which wise and skilful men had prepared when the light did shine, and there was no tempest raging upon the sea, he is enabled, it may be, to grope his way in safety to his desired port. And this, sir, is our consolation upon occa

sions like the present one. Jackson, and Calhoun, and Clay, and Wright, and Polk, and Woodbury, and Webster, are indeed no more; and if all that they thought, and said, and did their wise conceptions, and their heroic deeds, and their bright examples-were buried with them, how terribly deepened would now be our sense of the nation's loss, and how much less hopeful the prospects of republican liberty! But it is not so. "A superior and commanding human intellect," Mr. Webster has himself told us, "a truly great man, when Heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift, is not a temporary flame, burning brightly for a while, and then, 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.' sir, our great men do not wholly die. All that they achieved worthy of remembrance survives them. They live in their recorded actions; they live in their bright examples; they live in the respect and gratitude of mankind; and they live in that peculiar influence by which one single commanding thought, as it runs along the electric chain of human affairs, sets in motion still other thoughts and influences, in endless progression, and thus makes its author an active and powerful agent in the events of life, long after his mortal portion shall have crumbled in the tomb.

No,

Let us thank God for this immortality of worth, and rejoice in every example which is given to us of what our nature is capable of accomplishing. Let it teach us, not despair, but courage, and lead us to follow in its light, at however great a distance, and with however unequal steps. This is the lesson of wisdom, as well as of poetry.

"Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of Time;
"Footprints that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwreck'd brother,
Seeing, may take heart again."

When God shall send his Angel to us, Mr. Speaker, bearing the scroll of death, may we be able to bow our heads to his mission with as much of gentleness and resignation as marked the last hours of DANIEL WEBSTER!

VIII.

MR. PRESTON.

Mr. SPEAKER: I have been requested, by some of the gentlemen who compose the delegation from my State, to make some remarks upon the subject of the message and resolutions received from the Senate, which have been laid upon your table this morning, in relation to the death of Mr. Webster. It was, in their opinion, peculiarly appropriate that Kentucky-a State so long associated with Massachusetts in political sympathy, as well as in reciprocal admiration entertained for two of the most eminent men of their day-should come forward and add her testimonial of the esteem in which she held his life and great public services, and the regret she experienced at the calamity which has befallen the country. The mind naturally goes back, in looking over the great career of Daniel Webster, to the period of his birth-seventy years ago. In the northern part of the State of New Hampshire, beneath the roof of his pioneer father, the future statesman first drew the breath of life, and imbibed, amid its picturesque scenery and wild mountains, that freedom of thought, that dignity, and that intellectual health which left so indelible a mark upon his oratory and public career in after-life. No. man has earned a greater reputation, in the present time, in forensic endeavor, than Mr. Webster, nor any whose reputation could challenge comparison, unless it be one who was also born in a similar obscure station of life, amid the marshes of Hanover, and whose future led him to cross the summit of the Appalachian range with the great tide of population which poured from Virginia upon the fertile

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