respect to intellectual eminence; and, if Webster had then and there placed himself squarely on his position as the son of a Northern laborer, we should have been spared all the rhetoric about Northern “mud-sills,” with which the Senate was afterwards afflicted.  Webster was our man of men; and it would seem that he should have crushed such talk at the outset, by proudly assuming that Northern labor was embodied and impersonated in him,—­that HE had sprung from its ranks, and was proud of his ancestry.

An ingenious and powerful, but paradoxical thinker, once told me that I was mistaken in calling Jonathan Edwards and Daniel Webster great reasoners.  “They were bad reasoners,” he added, “but great poets.”  Without questioning the right of the author of “An Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notion of that Freedom of the Will, which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency,” to be ranked among the most eminent of modern logicians, I could still understand why he was classed among poets; for whether Edwards paints the torments of hell or the bliss of heaven, his imagination almost rivals that of Dante in intensity of realization.  But it was at first puzzling to comprehend why Webster should be depressed as a reasoner in order to be exalted as a poet.  The images and metaphors scattered over his speeches are so evidently brought in to illustrate and enforce his statements and arguments, that, grand as they often are, the imagination displayed in them is still a faculty strictly subsidiary to the reasoning power.  It was only after reflecting patiently for some time on the seeming paradox that I caught a glimpse of my friend’s meaning; and it led me at once to consider an entirely novel question, not heretofore mooted by any of Webster’s critics, whether friendly or unfriendly, in their endeavors to explain the reason of his influence over the best minds of the generation to which he belonged.  In declaring that, as a poet, he far exceeded any capacity he evinced as a reasoner, my paradoxical friend must have meant that Webster had the poet’s power of so organizing a speech, that it stood out to the eye of the mind as a palpable intellectual product and fact, possessing, not merely that vague reality which comes from erecting a plausible mental structure of deductive argumentation, based on strictly limited premises, but a positive reality, akin to the products of Nature herself, when she tries her hand in constructing a ledge of rocks or rearing a chain of hills.

In illustration, it may be well to cite the example of poets with whom Webster, of course, cannot be compared.  Among the great mental facts, palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such creations as the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust.  The commentaries and criticisms on these are numerous enough to occupy the shelves of a large library; some of them attempt to show that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and