That day in Faneuil Hall I felt his “big way” and it overpowered, though the sentences were really few and commonplace.  What must he have been in his prime!  What sentences in the whole history of oratory have more swayed men than those he uttered!  I recall that in 1861 we young men of the North did not much argue the question of the right of secession.  The Constitution was obscure about it, and one easily became befogged if he sought to weigh the right and the wrong of it.  But Webster had replied to Hayne.  Those were the days when schoolboys “spoke pieces,” and in thousands of schoolhouses the favourite piece was his matchless peroration.  From its opening, “When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in the heavens,” to the final outburst, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” it was all as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord’s Prayer, and scarcely less consecrated.  No logical unravelling of the tangle, but that burning expression of devotion to the Union, lay behind the enthusiasm with which we sprang to arms.  The ghost of Webster hovered in the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any other that rallied and kept us at the firing-line.

I think my mother told me once that on the canal-boat as we went West in the thirties, we had Webster for a time as a fellow-passenger, who good-naturedly patted the heads of the two little boys who then made up her brood.  I wish I could be sure that the hand of Webster had once rested on my head.  His early utterances as to slavery are warm with humane feeling.  I have come to feel that his humanity did not cool, but he grew into the belief that agitation at the time would make sure the destruction of the country, in his eyes the supreme calamity.  The injustice, hoary from antiquity, not recognised as injustice until within a generation or two, might wait a generation or two longer before we dealt with it.  Let the evil be endured a while that the greater evil might not come.  I neither defend nor denounce him.  I am now only remembering; and what a stately and solemn image it is to remember!

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William H. Seward, unlike Webster, had the handicap of an unimpressive exterior, nor had his voice the profound and conquering note which is so potent an ally of the mind in subduing men.  I heard Seward’s oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling with the heavy-garnered wheat.  I recall an inconspicuous figure, of ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the large nose (Emerson called it “corvine"), but that, as some one has said, is the hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom fortune is to drag forward into leadership.  He spoke in the pulpit of my grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister of the old Pilgrim parish.  From that coign of vantage, my faithful grandsire