A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster: Preached at the Melodeon, October 31, 1852

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B. B. Mussey & Company, 1853 - History - 108 pages
An uncomplimentary memorial emphasizing negative aspects of Webster's Seventh of March speech and criticizing certain personal qualities and habits.

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Page 78 - See, what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury, New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; A combination, and a form, indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a man : This was your husband.
Page 99 - Scorn ! would the angels laugh, to mark A bright soul driven, Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark, From hope and heaven! Let not the land once proud of him Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, Dishonored brow.
Page 64 - ... by inspiring a salutary and conservative principle of virtue and of knowledge in an early age. We hope to excite a feeling of respectability, and a sense of character, by enlarging the capacity and increasing the sphere of intellectual enjoyment. By general instruction, we seek, as far as possible, to purify the whole moral atmosphere ; to keep good sentiments uppermost, and to turn the strong current of feeling and opinion, as well as the censures of the law and the denunciations of religion,...
Page 50 - Christian states, in whose hearts there dwell no sentiments of humanity or of justice, and over whom neither the fear of God nor the fear of man exercises a control. In the sight of our law, the African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon ; and in the sight of Heaven, an offender ' far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt.
Page 107 - No further seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode — There they alike in trembling hope repose — The bosom of his Father and his God.
Page 26 - Lastly, our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits.
Page 28 - If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, Heaven will assist us to carry on the work of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our path. Washington is in the clear upper sky. Those other stars have now joined the American constellation ; they circle round their centre, and the heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination, let us walk the course of life, and at its close devoutly...
Page 70 - Pure Religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
Page 58 - homebred right, ' a fireside privilege. It hath ever been enjoyed in every house, cottage and cabin in the nation. It is not to be drawn into controversy. It is as undoubted as the right of breathing the air, or walking on the earth. Belonging to private life as a right, it belongs to public life as a duty ; and it is the last duty, which those, whose Representative I am, shall find me to abandon.
Page 31 - United States, as well as for purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign, and independent state of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without power to protect its people, or to defend them from oppression, from whatever quarter it comes.

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