John Randolph once touched the quick by saying, “If Daniel Webster was employed on a case and he had partially lost faith in it, his belief in his client’s rights could always be refreshed and his zeal renewed by a check.”

Webster had every possible qualification that is required to make the great orator.  All those who heard him speak, when telling of it, begin by relating how he looked.  He worked the dignity and impressiveness of his Jovelike presence to its furthest limit, and when once thoroughly awake was in possession of his entire armament.

No other American has been able to speak with a like degree of effectiveness; and his name deserves to rank, and will rank, with the names of Burke, Chatham, Sheridan and Pitt.  The case has been tried, the verdict is in and recorded on the pages of history.  There can be no retrial, for Webster is dead, and his power died thirty years before his form was laid to rest at Marshfield by the side of his children and the wife of his youth.

Oratory is the lowest of the sublime arts.  The extent of its influence will ever be a vexed question.  Its result depends on the mood and temperament of the hearer.  But there are men who are not ripe for treason and conspiracy, to whom even music makes small appeal.  Yet music can be recorded, entrusted to an interpreter yet unborn, and lodge its appeal with posterity.  Literature never dies:  it dedicates itself to Time.  For the printed page is reproduced ten thousand times ten thousand times, and besides, lives as did the Homeric poems, passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth.  Were every book containing Shakespeare’s plays burned this night, tomorrow they could be rewritten by those who know their every word.

With the passing years the painter’s colors fade; time rots his canvas; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and exists in fragments from which we resurrect a nation’s life; but oratory dies on the air and exists only as a memory in the minds of those who can not translate, and then as hearsay.  So much for the art itself; but the influence of that art is another thing.

He who influences the beliefs and opinions of men influences all other men that live after.  For influence, like matter, can not be destroyed.

In many ways, Webster lacked the inward steadfastness that his face and frame betokened; but on one theme he was sound to the inmost core.  He believed in America’s greatness and the grandeur of America’s mission.  Into the minds of countless men he infused his own splendid patriotism.  From his first speech at Hanover when eighteen years old, to his last when nearly seventy, he fired the hearts of men with the love of native land.  And how much the growing greatness of our country is due to the magic of his words and the eloquence of his inspired presence no man can compute.

The passion of Webster’s life is well mirrored in that burning passage: