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In May, 1852, Mr. Webster said to Professor Silliman:  “I have given my life to law and politics.  Law is uncertain and politics are utterly vain.”  It is a sad commentary for such a man to have made on such a career, but it fitly represents Mr. Webster’s feelings as the end of life approached.  His last years were not his most fortunate, and still less his best years.  Domestic sorrows had been the prelude to a change of policy, which had aroused a bitter opposition, and to the pangs of disappointed ambition.  A sense of mistake and failure hung heavily upon his spirits, and the cry of “vanity, vanity, all is vanity,” came readily to his lips.  There is an infinite pathos in those melancholy words which have just been quoted.  The sun of life, which had shone so splendidly at its meridian, was setting amid clouds.  The darkness which overspread him came from the action of the 7th of March, and the conflict which it had caused.  If there were failure and mistake they were there.  The presidency could add nothing, its loss could take away nothing from the fame of Daniel Webster.  He longed for it eagerly; he had sacrificed much to his desire for it; his disappointment was keen and bitter at not receiving what seemed to him the fit crown of his great public career.  But this grief was purely personal, and will not be shared by posterity, who feel only the errors of those last years coming after so much glory, and who care very little for the defeat of the ambition which went with them.

Those last two years awakened such fierce disputes, and had such an absorbing interest, that they have tended to overshadow the half century of distinction and achievement which preceded them.  Failure and disappointment on the part of such a man as Webster seem so great, that they too easily dwarf everything else, and hide from us a just and well proportioned view of the whole career.  Mr. Webster’s success had, in truth, been brilliant, hardly equalled in measure or duration by that of any other eminent man in our history.  For thirty years he had stood at the head of the bar and of the Senate, the first lawyer and the first statesman of the United States.  This is a long tenure of power for one man in two distinct departments.  It would be remarkable anywhere.  It is especially so in a democracy.  This great success Mr. Webster owed solely to his intellectual power supplemented by great physical gifts.  No man ever was born into the world better formed by nature for the career of an orator and statesman.  He had everything to compel the admiration and submission of his fellow-men:—­

           “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.”