“I could tell you a great deal more about oxygen, and hydrogen, and carbon, and water, and breathing, that Professor Faraday said, if I had time; but you should go and hear him yourself, uncle.”

“Eh? well!  I think I will.  Some of us seniors may learn something from a juvenile lecture, at any rate, if given by a Faraday.  And now, my boy.  I will tell you what,” added Mr. Bagges, “I am very glad to find you so fond of study and science; and you deserve to be encouraged:  and so I’ll give you a what-d’ye-call-it’?—­a Galvanic Battery, on your next birth-day; and so much for your teaching your old uncle the chemistry of a candle.”

* * * * *

[FROM A REVIEW OF GRISWOLD’S PROSE WRITERS OF AMERICA, IN THE SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.]

DANIEL WEBSTER,

AS A STATESMAN, AND AS A MAN OF LETTERS.

Mr. Webster is properly selected as the representative of the best sense, and highest wisdom, and most consummate dignity, of the politics and oratory of the present times, because his great intelligence has continued to be so finely sensitive to all the influences that stir the action and speculation of the country.

With elements of reason, definite, absolute, and emphatic; with principles settled, strenuous, deep and unchangeable as his being; his wisdom is yet exquisitely practical:  with subtlest sagacity it apprehends every change in the circumstances in which it is to act, and can accommodate its action without loss of vigor, or alteration of its general purpose.  Its theories always “lean and hearken” to the actual.  By a sympathy of the mind, almost transcendental in its delicacy, its speculations are attracted into a parallelism with the logic of life and nature.  In most men, that intellectual susceptibility by which they are capable of being reacted upon by the outer world, and having their principles and views expanded, modified or quickened, does not outlast the first period of life; from that time they remain fixed and rigid in their policy, temper and characteristics; if a new phase of society is developed, it must find its exponent in other men.  But in Webster this fresh suggestive sensibility of the judgment has been carried on into the matured and determined wisdom of manhood.  His perceptions, feelings, reasonings, tone, are always up to the level of the hour, or in advance of it; sometimes far, very far in advance, as in the views thrown out in his speech at Baltimore, on an international commercial system, in which he showed that he then foresaw both the fate of the tariff and the fallacy of free-trade.  No man has ever been able to say, or now can say, that he is before Webster.  The youngest men in the nation look to him, not as representing the past, but as leading in the future.