In like manner the obelisks and the temples of ancient Egypt are covered with the sculptured images of whole dynasties of Pharaohs -older than Moses, older than Joseph-whose titles are recorded in the hieroglyphics with which the granite is charged, and which are gradually yielding up their long concealed mysteries to the sagacity of modern criticism. The plastic arts, as they passed into Hellas, with all the other arts which give grace and dignity to our nature, reached a perfection unknown to Egypt or Assyria; and the heroes and sages of Greece and Rome, immortalized by the sculptor, still people the galleries and museums of the modern world. In every succeeding age and in every country, in which the fine arts have been cultivated, the respect and affection of survivors have found a pure and rational gratification in the historical portrait and the monumental statue of the honored and loved in private life, and especially of the great and good who have deserved well of their country. Public esteem and confidence and private affection, the gratitude of the community and the fond memories of the fire-side, have ever sought, in this way, to prolong the sensible existence of their beloved and respected objects. What though the dear and honored features and person, on which while living we never gazed without tenderness or veneration, have been taken from us something of the loveliness, something of the majesty abides in the portrait, the bust, and the statue. The heart bereft of the living originals turn to them, and cold and silent as they are, they strengthen and animate the cherished recollections of the loved, the honored, and the lost.

The skill of the painter and sculptor, which thus comes in aid of the memory and imagination, is, in its highest degree, one of the rarest, as it is one of the most exquisite accomplishments within our attainment, and in its perfection as seldom witnessed as the perfection of speech or of music. The plastic hand must be moved by the same ethereal instinct as the eloquent lips or the recording pen. The number of those who, in the language of Michael Angelo, can discern the finished statue in the heart of the shapeless block, and bid it start into artistic life-who are endowed with the exquisite gift of molding the rigid bronze or the lifeless marble into graceful, majestic, and expressive forms-is not greater than the number of those who are able, with equal majesty, grace, and expressiveness, to make the spiritual essence-the finest shades of thought and feeling-sensible to the mind, through the eye and the ear, in the mysterious embodiment of the written and the spoken word. If Athens in her palmiest days had but one Pericles, she had also but one Phidias.

Nor are these beautiful and noble arts, by which the face and the form of the departed are preserved to us-calling into the highest exercise as they do all the imitative and idealizing powers of the painter and the sculptor-the least instructive of our teachers. The portraits and the statues of the honored dead kindle the gener

ous ambition of the youthful aspirant to fame. Themistocles could not sleep for the trophies in the Ceramicus; and when the living Demosthenes, to whom you, sir [Mr. Felton], have alluded, had ceased to speak, the stony lips remained to rebuke and exhort his degenerate countrymen. More than a hundred years have elapsed since the great Newton passed away; but from age to age his statue by Roubillac, in the ante-chapel of Trinity College, will give distinctness to the conceptions formed of him by hundreds and thousands of ardent youthful spirits, filled with reverence for that transcendent intellect, which, from the phenomena that fall within our limited vision, deduced the imperial law by which the Sovereign Mind rules the entire universe. We can never look on the person of Washington, but his serene and noble countenance, perpetuated by the pencil and the chisel, is familiar to far greater multitudes than ever stood in his living presence, and will be thus familiar to the latest generation.

What parent, as he conducts his son to Mount Auburn or to Bunker Hill, will not, as he pauses before their monumental statues, seek to heighten his reverence for virtue, for patriotism, for science, for learning, for devotion to the public good, as he bids him contemplate the form of that grave and venerable Winthrop, who left his pleasant home in England to come and found a new republic in this untrodden wilderness; of that ardent and intrepid Otis, who first struck out the spark of American Independence; of that noble Adams, its most eloquent champion on the floor of Congress; of that martyr Warren, who laid down his life in its defense; of that self-taught Bowditch, who, without a guide, threaded the starry mazes of the heavens; of that Story, honored at home and abroad as one of the brightest luminaries of the law, and by a felicity, of which I believe there is no other example, admirably portrayed in marble by his son? What citizen of Boston, as he accompanies the stranger around our streets, guiding him through our busy thoroughfares, to our wharfs crowded with vessels which range every sea and gather the produce of every climate-up to the dome of this Capitol, which commands as lovely a landscape as can delight the eye or gladden the heart, will not, as he calls his attention at last to the statues of Franklin and Webster, exclaim"Boston takes pride in her natural position, she rejoices in her beautiful environs, she is grateful for her material prosperity; but richer than the merchandise stored in palatial warehouses, greener than the slopes of sea-girt islets, lovelier than this encircling panorama of land and sea, of field and hamlet, of lake and stream, of garden and grove, is the memory of her sons, native and adopted; the character, services, and fame of those who have benefited and adorned their day and generation. Our children, and the schools at which they are trained, our citizens, and the services they have rendered; these are our jewels, these our abiding treasures."

Yes, your long rows of quarried granite may crumble to the

dust; the cornfields in yonder villages, ripening to the sickle, may, like the plains of stricken Lombardy, a few weeks ago, be kneaded into bloody clods by the madding wheels of artillery; this populous city, like the old cities of Etruria and the Campagna Romana, may be desolated by the pestilence which walketh in darkness, may decay with the lapse of time, and the busy mart, which now rings with the joyous din of trade, become as lonely and still as Carthage or Tyre, as Babylon and Nineveh; but the names of the great and good shall survive the desolation and the ruin; the memory of the wise, the brave, the patriotic, shall never perish. Yes, Sparta is a wheat-field; a Bavarian prince holds court at the foot of the Acropolis; the traveling virtuoso digs for marbles in the Roman Forum, and beneath the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; but Lycurgus and Leonidas, and Miltiades and Demosthenes, and Cato and Tully "still live;" and HE still lives, and all the great and good shall live in the heart of ages, while marble and bronze shall endure; and when marble and bronze have perished, they shall "still live" in memory, so long as men shall reverence Law, and honor Patriotism, and love Liberty!

EULOGIES AT THE TIME OF MR. WEBSTER'S DECEASE.

Seven years, within a few weeks, have passed since he, whose statue we inaugurate to-day, was taken from us. The voice of respectful and affectionate eulogy, which was uttered in this vicinity and city at the time, was promptly echoed throughout the country. The tribute paid to his memory, by friends, neighbors, and fellowcitizens, was responded to from the remotest corners of the Republic, by those who never gazed on his noble countenance, or listened to the deep melody of his voice. This city, which in early manhood he chose for his home; his associates in the honorable profession of which he rose to be the acknowledged head; the law school of the neighboring university speaking by the lips of one so well able to do justice to his legal pre-eminence; the college at which he was educated, and whose chartered privileges he had successfully maintained before the highest tribunal of the country; with other bodies and other eulogists, at the bar, in the pulpit, and on the platform, throughout the Union, in numbers greater, I believe, than have ever spoken on any other similar occasion, except that of the death of Washington, joined with the almost unanimous press of the country, in one chorus of admiration of his talents, recognition of his patriotic services, and respect and affection for his memory.

Nor have these offerings been made at his tomb alone. Twice or thrice since his death, once within a few months-the anniversary of his birthday-has called forth, at the table of patriotic festivity, the voice of fervid eulogy and affectionate commemoration. In this way, and on these occasions, his character has been delineated by those best able to do justice to his powers and attain

ments, to appreciate his services, to take the measure, if I may so say, of his colossal mental stature. Without going beyond this immediate neighborhood, and in no degree ungrateful for the liberality, or insensible to the ability with which he has been eulogized in other parts of the country, what need be said, what can be said in the hearing of those who have listened to Hillard, to Chief Justice Parker, to Cushing, and to our lamented Choate, whose discourse on Mr. Webster at Dartmouth College appears to me as magnificent a eulogium as was ever pronounced?

What can be said that has not been better said before;-what need be said now that seven added years in the political progress of the country, seven years of respectful and affectionate recollection on the part of those who now occupy the stage, have confirmed his title to the large place which, while he lived, he filled in the public mind? While he yet bore a part in the councils of the Union, he shared the fate which, in all countries, and especially in all free countries, awaits commanding talent and eminent position;which no great man in our history-not Washington himself-has ever escaped; which none can escape, but those who are too feeble to provoke opposition, too obscure for jealousy. But now that he has rested for years in his honored grave, what generous nature is not pleased to strew flowers on the sod? What honorable opponent, still faithful to principle, is not willing that all in which he differed from him should be referred, without bitterness, to the impartial arbitrament of time; and that all that he respected and loved should be cordially remembered? What public man, especially, who, with whatever differences of judgment of men or measures, has borne on his own shoulders the heavy burden of responsibilitywho has felt how hard it is, in the larger complications of affairs, at all times to meet the expectations of an intelligent and watchful, but impulsive and not always thoroughly instructed public; how difficult sometimes to satisfy his own judgment-is not willing that the noble qualities and patriotic services of Webster should be honorably recorded in the book of the country's remembrance, and his statue set up in the Pantheon of her illustrious sons?

POSTHUMOUS HONORS.

These posthumous honors lovingly paid to departed worth are among the compensations which a kind Providence vouchsafes for the unavoidable conflicts of judgment and stern collisions of party, which make the political career always arduous, even when pursued with the greatest success, generally precarious, sometimes destructive of health and even life. It is impossible under free governments to prevent the existence of party; not less impossible that parties should be conducted with spirit and vigor without more or less injustice done and suffered, more or less gross uncharitableness and bitter denunciation. Besides, with the utmost effort at impartiality, it is not within the competence of our frail

capacities to do full justice at the time to a character of varied and towering greatness, engaged in an active and responsible political career. The truth of his principles, the wisdom of his counsels, the value of his services must be seen in their fruits, and the richest fruits are not those of the most rapid growth. The wisdom of antiquity pronounced that no one was to be deemed happy until after death; not merely because he was then first placed beyond the vicissitudes of human fortune, but because then only the rival interests, the discordant judgments, the hostile passions of cotemporaries are, in ordinary cases, no longer concerned to question his merits. Horace, with gross adulation, sung to his imperial master, Augustus, that he alone of the great of the earth ever received while living the full meed of praise. All the other great benefactors of mankind, the inventors of arts, the destroyers of monsters, the civilizers of states, found by experience that unpopularity was appeased by death alone.*

That solemn event, which terminates the material existence, becomes by the sober revisions of cotemporary judgment, aided by offices of respectful and affectionate commemoration, the commencement of a nobler life on earth. The wakeful eyes are closed, the feverish pulse is still, the tired and trembling limbs are relieved from their labors, and the aching head is laid to rest on the lap of its mother earth, like a play-worn child at the close of a summer's day; but all that we honored and loved in the living man begins to live again in a new and higher being of influence and fame. It was given but to a limited number to listen to the living voice, and they can never listen to it again; but the wise teachings, the grave admonitions, the patriotic exhortations which fell from his tongue will be gathered together and garnered up in the memory of millions. The cares, the toils, the sorrows; the conflicts with others, the conflicts of the fervent spirit with itself; the sad accidents of humanity, the fears of the brave, the follies of the wise, the errors of the learned; all that dashed the cup of enjoyment with bitter drops and strewed sorrowful ashes over the beauty of expectation and promise; the treacherous friend, the ungenerous rival, the mean and malignant foe; the uncharitable prejudice which withheld the just tribute of praise, the human frailty which wove sharp thorns into the wreath of solid merit;—all these in ordinary cases are buried in the grave of the illustrious dead; while their brilliant talents, their deeds of benevolence and public spirit, their wise and eloquent words, the healing counsels, their generous affections, the whole man, in short, whom we revered and loved and would fain imitate, especially when his image is impressed upon our recollections by the pencil or the chisel, goes forth to the admiration of the latest posterity. Extinctus amabiter idem.

* Comperit invidiam supremo fine domari.